Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Given by the artist to Alderman Edward Samuelson of Liverpool c.1878;
Thomas Edsmond Lowinsky by whom given to his daughter Mrs Katherine Thirkell and her husband Lance Thirkell and thence by descent

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Grand Loan Exhibition, 1886, no.1426

T. Martin Wood, Drawings of D.G. Rossetti, n.d., illustrated plate XXXIX;
Arthur Symons, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, n.d., illustrated p.40;
Virginia Surtees, Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1828-1882 - The Paintings and Drawings, A Catalogue Raisonné, 1971, vol.1. p.45 cat.no.81.R.I.B.

The sheet is discoloured in areas with a few isolated spots of foxing (not to the figure). A line of staining above the top of Dante's head and the drawing has been rubbed (which can be restored). A small tear to the top left corner and the lower right corner is irregular in shape. There is the collector's mark of Lowinsky in the lower right corner. Held under glass in original pre-Raphaelite frame; unexamined out of frame.
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This drawing is one of the final studies made for Rossetti’s monumental oil painting Dante’s Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice completed in 1874 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) depicting a scene described in the Vita Nuova in which Dante dreams of being led by Love to Beatrice who is lying beneath a flower-strewn pall held by two female attendants. This ambitious project was very important to Rossetti and he was reluctant to abandon the painting, even when his patron William Graham had refused it because of its large size.

After Graham's refusal to buy the painting, Rossetti sold it to another of his patrons Leonard Valpy who sold it in 1878 after moving house and having nowhere to hang it. It was then sold to Liverpool Corporation for £1,550 and at this time Rossetti gave the present drawing to Alderman Edward Samuelson (1823-1898), chairman of the arts and exhibitions sub-committee for Liverpool. This was also the same year that Samuelson had caused a minor scandal by accusing Alma-Tadema of immortality for his large nude study The Sculptor's Model (sold in these rooms 17 December 2015, lot 15) which had been exhibited at the Autumn exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery. The drawing was later owned by the British Surrealist artist Thomas Esmond Lowinsky and given by him to his daughter Katherine who was married to Lance Thirkell, a descendant of Rossetti's fellow Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones.

According to the artist's brother William Michael Rossetti, the model for the head of Dante in Rossetti's painting was the photographer William Stillman, whilst his studio assistant Henry Treffry Dunn states that it was Charles Augustus Howell. However both these identifications probably relate to an earlier drawing (Victoria & Albert Museum). The most likely sitter for this final drawing was identified by Maria Stillman, according to an annotation on a print of the present drawing (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard) as a professional model called Alessandro. Maria would have had first-hand experience of the other models who posed for the picture as she appears as one of Beatrice's attendants; a study of her head for Dante's Dream was sold in these rooms (17 December 2015, lot 4). 'Alessandro' was Alessandro di Marco, a former organ-grinder from Piedmont who appears to have first modelled for Leighton as a small child in Rome in 1853 for Cimabue's Madonna (Royal Collection, on long-term loan to the National Gallery, London). He seems to have made his way to the ateliers of Paris but as William Blake Richmond recorded; 'The war had forced Paris to disgorge the Italian models, who came over to us. There was, indeed, a splendid group of them to choose from, and finding the English pay better than the Parisians, many remained here for years. Among them was Alessandro di Marco, a man who seemed to stride out from Signorelli's grand frescoes, a man whom we all painted and drew from, a fellow so graceful and of such a colour, a kind of bronzegold, having a skin of so fine a texture that the movement of every muscle was not disguised, not a film of fat disfigured his shapely limbs. Only a peasant, people say! Yes--but of a race of Kings--so noble he looked. Alessandro was the most inspiring model I have ever drawn from...' (Simon Reynolds, William Blake Richmond, p.45) By the late 1860s he was modelling in London for Richmond, Poynter, Leighton, Solomon, Burne-Jones and the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. He was the model for Burne-Jones' Love Among the Ruins (Christie's, 11 July 2013, lot 3) and remarkably for the principal figure in The Renaissance of Venus (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) by Walter Crane, whose wife forbid him to study naked female models.