Rossetti: His life and works

A plain account of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his life and works, may merit interest and attention for two reasons, writes Evelyn Waugh. First, taking Rossetti simply as a character for a story, his life is one of intense interest; second, his turgid and perverse genius provides a needed kick to conventional aesthetic standards. A fascinating account of Rossetti’s consistently mysterious, at times vapid, but ultimately tragic life combines, under Waugh’s deft hand, with a presentation of the provocative personalities, Pre-Raphaelite and otherwise, of Rossetti’s world—Ford Madox Brown, John Ruskin, William Morris, and others—as well as of his muses Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Schott, and Jane Morris, and his creations by both paint and poetic pen. The portrait of Rossetti which results is at once keenly perceptive, modestly amusing, and undeniably interesting. Waugh’s first book, commissioned by the publisher and published in 1928, Rossetti: His Life and Works is a critical entry in the Waugh canon. It is also an accomplishment of both art history and criticism, thanks to its candid presentation of that “baffled and very tragic figure of an artist born into an age devoid of artistic standards…a mystic without a creed; a Catholic without the discipline or consolation of the Church; a life between the rocks and the high road.”