It’s frivolous. It’s fun. Wombat Friday is growing and every week I gleefully enjoy everyone’s contributions. Apart from the silliness, I’m sort of moved by it all. It feels like a shared sense of community. Beneath a layer of wombat tomfoolery lies evidence of our shared passion and enthusiasm. Somehow we stumbled upon a sort of group project.
Rossetti was right. Wombats are a delight and a madness.
Pearls adorn Love’s Shadow by Frederick Sandys
A pearl rosary in the background of Kate Bunce’s The Keepsake:
Large pearls are strung at intervals in Helen’s necklace (Helen of Troy, Dante Gabriel Rossetti)
Three pearls suspended from a brooch in The Pale Complexion of True Love by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale:
To the ancient Greeks, they were tears of the gods.
My grandmother’s akoya pearls are the most precious piece of jewelry I own, beside my wedding ring. Apart from their sentimental value, they have a gorgeous lustre and have aged quite well.
Pearls appear front and center in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Belcolore:
And in Fanny Cornforth’s hair in Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata:
Of course, I’ve written about Rossetti’s spiral hair pin in the blog post Hair Adornment in Rossetti paintings. Kirsty Walker once made biscuits based on the pearl hair pin. And Grace Nuth blogged about it at The Beautiful Necessity.
In Waterhouse’s 1894 Ophelia, pearls appear on both the cuffs and hem of her dress, along with other jewels:
Waterhouse also shows pearls in beautiful blend of water and folkore:
The Mermaid
Hylas and the Nymphs
In Waterhouse’s La Belle Dame sans Merci, we see three pearls in her hair and along the hem of her dress:
Woven in the hair of the Waterhouse classic, The Soul of the Rose:
Worn by a young Ellen Terry in G.F.Watts’ Choosing:
Viola by Emma Sandys:
Elaine by Emma Sandys:
Pearl buttons on Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale’s The Little Foot Page:
Evelyn De Morgan’s Medea wears them in her hair:
Last week I shared an account of Burne-Jones and Rossetti and their fascination with that delightful creature, the wombat. Today I share another contemporary account of Rossetti and his strange collection of animals. Alas, no mention of the beloved wombat, but it is an interesting account of Rossetti and his menagerie.
From The Story of My Life by Dame Ellen Terry:
“Miss Herbert was not a remarkable actress, but her appearance was wonderful indeed. She was very tall, with pale gold hair and the spiritual, ethereal look which the aesthetic movement loved. When mother wanted to flatter me very highly, she said that I looked like Miss Herbert! Rossetti founded many of his pictures on her, and she and Mrs. “Janie” Morris were his favorite types. When any one was the object of Rossetti’s devotion, there was no extravagant length to which he would not go in demonstrating it. He bought a white bull because it had “eyes like Janie Morris,” and tethered it on the lawn of his home in Chelsea. Soon there was no lawn left—only the bull! He invited people to meet it, and heaped favors on it until it kicked everything to pieces, when he reluctantly got rid of it.
His next purchase was a white peacock, which, very soon after its arrival, disappeared under the sofa. In vain did Rossetti “shoo” it out. It refused to budge. This went on for days.
“The lovely creature won’t respond to me,” said Rossetti pathetically to a friend.
The friend dragged out the bird.
“No wonder! It’s dead!”
“Bulls don’t like me,” said Rossetti a few days later, “and peacocks aren’t homely.”
It preyed on his mind so much that he tried to repair the failure by buying some white dormice. He sat them up on tiny bamboo chairs, and they looked sweet. When the winter was over, he invited a party to meet them and congratulate them upon waking up from their long sleep.
“They are awake now,” he said, “but how quiet they are! How full of repose!”
One of the guests went to inspect the dormice more closely, and a peculiar expression came over his face. It might almost have been thought that he was holding his nose.
“Wake up, little dormice,” said Rossetti, prodding them gently with a quill pen.
“They’ll never do that,” said the guest. “They’re dead. I believe they have been dead some days!”
Do you think Rossetti gave up live stock after this? Not a bit of it. He tried armadillos and tortoises.
“How are the tortoises?” he asked his man one day, after a long spell of forgetfulness that he had any.
“Pretty well, sir, thank you…. That’s to say, sir, there ain’t no tortoises!”
The tortoises, bought to eat the beetles, had been eaten themselves. At least, the shells were found full of beetles.
And the armadillos? “The air of Chelsea don’t suit them,” said Rossetti’s servant. They had certainly left Rossetti’s house, but they had not left Chelsea. All the neighbors had dozens of them! They had burrowed, and came up smiling in houses where they were far from welcome.”–text via Project Gutenberg
Happy Wombat Friday! With brownies!
Georgiana Burne-Jones writes about Rossetti’s interest in wombats in Memorials of Burne-Jones, vol. I:
“Mr. Prinsep says that the windows in the spaces they were painting were whitened in order to tone the light, and that the whitened glass was covered all over with sketches, chiefly of wombats. ”Do you know the wombat at the zoo?” asked Rossetti; “a delightful creature–the most comical little beast.” He was drawn by Edward in endless different positions and situations, and Rossetti’s admiration led him years afterwards to buy a live one and try to make it happy at Cheyne Walk”
By the way, would you like my brownie recipe? I wish that I could say that these are Pre-Raphaelite brownies, a recipe handed down within the Millais or Rossetti family. But, alas, no. I’m pretty sure that brownies are American and I just happen to love them.
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 cup white sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 eggs
1/2 cup flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (I use Hershey’s)
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
Mix sugar, oil and vanilla well. Then beat in your two eggs. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt, and cocoa powder (I sort of eyeball the cocoa powder, so sometimes I may have more than 1/3 cup. Huzzah! More cocoa!). Now stir into your oil-sugar-eggs mixture.
Pour into a greased pan (I usually use a rectangular pan, although sometimes I use a cupcake pan). After pouring, lick the spoon well. This is non-optional for me.
Bake 20 minutes at 350 degrees.
Memorials of Burne-Jones, Vol. I, p. 149
Today I have been contemplating this passage from The Memorials of Burne-Jones:
“All the actual study of painting that Edward did with Rossetti was a few mornings’ work in his studio, but what he learnt from him was far more than painting. “He taught me to have no fear or shame of my own ideas, to design perpetually, to seek no popularity, to be altogether myself — and this in not any words I can remember, but in the tenor of his conversation always and in the spirit of everything he said. I remember that he discouraged me from study of the antique–the classical antique– giving as his reason that such study came too early in a man’s life and was apt to crush out his individuality; adding that when a man had once found his own and was much older and could front the fear of being crushed, a year or so given to much study would be an excellent thing. So what I chiefly gained from him was not to be afraid of myself, but to do the thing that I liked most: but in those first years I never wanted to think but as he thought, and all he did and said fitted me through and through. He never harangued or persuaded, but had a gift of saying things authoritatively and not as the Scribes, such as I had never heard in any man. ” (bold emphasis mine)
Burne-Jones’ caricature of himself in the studio at Red Lion Square
I received a package this week that was so lovely, I had to incorporate it into Wombat Friday. Thank you to Jo Secondo for sending me a vintage copy of The Macdonald Sisters, beautifully wrapped in William Morris paper and with a Rossetti card!
This site is written by Stephanie Pina. Email stephaniepina @ lizziesiddal.com; I can also be found at:
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