A 155-year-old letter from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to the banker and collector George Rae is going on show in Liverpool this week, explaining why the Pre-Raphaelite artist couldn’t make a meeting and deliver a long-awaited painting. The excuses included feeling “giddy and unwell,” “other troublesome symptoms,” and “constant diarrhoea.”
Held in the Walker Art Gallery archives in the U.K., the 1868 letter is will be going on view at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Wirral from December 19. It will be displayed next to Rossetti’s Sibylla Palmifera (1870), for which Rae had paid the painter a £300 deposit (the equivalent today of around £30,000 or $38,000) in December 1865.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti—born Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti but swapping Dante to his first name in adulthood as tribute to the 13th century poet Dante Alighieri—was one of seven founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and one of three present at their inaugural meeting. His brother the critic William Michael Rossetti was also a member, and their sister the poet Christina Rossetti also moved in their circle. The siblings were celebrated in London between April and September this year in Tate Britain’s “The Rossettis” exhibition.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti became infamous for his womanizing, drinking, and drug-taking. Melissa Gustin, curator of the exhibition at the art gallery, has cast doubt on the legitimacy of Rossetti’s claims in the 1868 letter, saying that it may actually be “the consequences of his own actions… there is a possibility that he might just be hungover.”
George Rae experienced a series of excuses from the artist over the course of five years. A year after paying the deposit, Rossetti told his patron that he had “somehow” not managed to complete the work yet; in July 1868, Rae had received the frame and the bill for the frame, but nothing else.
It was in response to a letter from Rae following the frame incident that Rossetti wrote to the collector about his stomach issues. It would be another two years before Sibylla Palmifera would be completed, after a letter sent by Rae at Christmas time in 1870 saying, “after the many, many Christmases we have looked forward to this supreme delight, could you not in the intervals of your greater work finish her merely as a relaxation?”
Gustin told The Guardian that the level of bodily detail Rossetti went into in his 1868 letter is not all that surprising: “We have this idea of the Victorians as being very reticent and not talking about their bodily issues—but they are actually fairly graphic.”
Rossetti died 12 years after the painting was completed due in part to his addiction to one of his medications, a newly developed sedative called choral.
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