Sunday, July 25, 2021

Found (For A Picture) painting and sonnet by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Found A Study for the Woman's Head - Woman's Head With Eyes Open. Hair Straight, Unlike In The Finished Study. Birmingham Museum. 1853-1857.


Study in for Found, black and brown ink and wash with white heightening on paper. Signed with monogram DGR and dated 1853, Birmingham Museum. 

 Was Elizabeth Siddal the original model for Rossetti’s painting, ‘Found’? 

These two drawings look very much like Lizzie dated 1853 Birmingham Museum.

Rossettis poem Found (for a picture) dates 1848-1881 from Sonnets and Fragments by DGR (bound manuscript Volume). Princeton University.

In the end, the model in his oil painting of Found was Fanny Cornforth his housekeeper. 

Found by Dante Gabriel Rossetti was Designed 1853; begun 1859; unfinished, oil on canvas, Delaware Art Museum, USA


Found  (For a Picture.) By Dante Gabriel Rossetti 

“There is a budding morrow in midnight:”—

So sang our Keats, our English nightingale.

And here, as lamps across the bridge turn pale

In London's smokeless resurrection-light,

Dark breaks to dawn. But o'er the deadly blight

Of love deflowered & sorrow of none avail

Which makes this man gasp and this woman quail,

Can day with from darkness ever again unite take flight ever again grow light?

Ah! gave not these two hearts their mutual pledge,

10Under one mantle sheltered 'neath the hedge

In gloaming courtship? And alas O God! to-day

He does but only knows he holds her;— and but what part

Life Can life now can take? She cries in her own locked heart,— in her shut heart

“Leave me—I do not know you—go away!”


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