Painting
The Blessed Damozel is the only one of Rossetti's paired pictures and poems in which the poem was completed first. Friends and patrons repeatedly urged Rossetti to illustrate his most famous poem, and he finally accepted a commission from William Graham in February 1871. After the work was completed Graham requested a predella, the lower part of the painting on December 31, 1877. His total cost was £1157. Alexa Wilding modelled the damozel in Paradise, Wilfred John Hawtrey modelled the child–angel, and the probable model for the left–hand angel was May Morris.
Frederick Richards Leyland commissioned eighteen paintings from Rossetti, not counting unfulfilled commissions. Soon after Leyland acquired his first Rossetti painting, he and Rossetti explored the idea of a Rossetti triptych, which was eventually formed with Mnemosyne, an 1879 replica of The Blessed Damozel painted by Rossetti himself, and Proserpine. Three additional Rossetti painting were then hung in Leyland's drawing room, all of which Leyland called "stunners."
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Famous quotes containing the word painting:
“Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after van Gogh’s stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
“If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.”
—James Mcneill Whistler (1834–1903)