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Dante Gabriel Rossetti + John Robert Parsons: Jane Burden Morris + The Blue Silk Dress 1865
Dante Gabriel Rossetti employs John Robert Parsons, a professional photographer, to make portraits of his lover – the pale woman with the original pre-Raphaelite hair, Jane Burden. Even through Jane’s marriage to the designer-writer-craftsman William Morris, Rossetti comes back to her again and again, with portraits that are literally dripping with the emotional intensity of his love. The practice of artists using photographs as reference for their paintings became fairly common from the mid 19th century - famous painters like Courbet, Monet, and Degas - and the pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti used specially commissioned photographs - partly to obviate long (expensive) live poses, partly for the photographic verisimilitude. In this case, you can see the magic that the loving (bewitched?) eye has on the raw material of the photograph - an ideal presence emerges..
Rossetti’s influence on the changing idea of feminine beauty in the mid-19th century should not be under-estimated. At this time, the first indications of revolt against the ‘strait-laced’ and crinolined absurdities of Victorian high fashion were being challenged by the girls and young women that Rossetti and his artist friends knew and painted. They began to wear clothes that were looser, not underpinned with corsets (they were called ‘loose women’ because of this), and were as a consequence much more comfortable and ‘natural’ in the sense that they did not restrict the female body. Their ‘bohemian’ clothes inspired what became known as the Rational Dress movement (1881) - a movement founded by another painter Fairlie Harmer, Viscountess Harberton. But what Rosetti is doing here is, I guess, what all painters of people have done since the Renaissance - effectively a painter is traditionally working from two sources - the actual appearance of the subject, and an internal mental construct of the person. In most cases before the 1840s, we have no other visual evidence of the sitter. But the invention of photography gave us another ‘objective’ resource - another way of gauging the painter’s work. And we know that Rossetti employed John Robert Parsons to photograph his beloved Jane Burden-Morris in many, many poses. And we have the results of Rosetti’s idealised synthesis of Jane in the Blue Silk rational dress, and in turn a new type of beauty emerges in the mid- Victorian age