Page 34 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 34/146
There are two aspects of the lovely Marie Spartali I want to focus on here: her role as a muse for leading Pre-Raphaelites, for Julia Margaret Cameron - a leading experimental photographer - and a friend and neighbour on the Isle of Wight); and her role as one of the leading painters of what has been recently dubbed The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood - (Jan Marsh: Pre Raphaelite Women. 1989). In the first instance there is no doubt that Rossetti especially held-up Spartali as an icon of the kind of beauty that he transmuted through his painting into a ‘Pre-Raphaelite ideal’ - in the same way that he had idealised and transformed Jane Burden Morris the year before (Rossetti: Jane Morris - The Blue Silk Dress 1868). When Madox Brown introduced Spartali to his friend Algernon Swinbur- ne around this time, the poet said of Spartali ‘She is so beautiful that I want to sit down and cry’. In the second case, Spartali was an professionally trained painter, particularly good at expressing the Pre-Raphaelite ideals in her paintings such as Love’s Messenger (above right) and in many others including A Rose in Armida’s Garden (1894) and Madonna Pietra degli Scrovigni (also 1894).
Ford Madox Brown: Portrait of Marie Spartali (1869) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Spartali_Stillman