Inspired by artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s passion for wombats, every Friday is Wombat Friday at Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. “The Wombat is a Joy, a Triumph, a Delight, a Madness!” – Dante Gabriel Rossetti Thaddeus Fern Diogenes Wombat has been poring over Rossetti paintings in order to be the best Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood assistant he can be. He’s…
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Inspired by artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s passion for wombats, every Friday is Wombat Friday at Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. “The Wombat is a Joy, a Triumph, a Delight, a Madness!” – Dante Gabriel Rossetti Thaddeus Fern Diogones Wombat is a willing assistant here at Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. Sure, he can be easily distracted and he has a tendency…
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Today begins the forty-second year of ME! ‘Tis my birthday! In Ulysses, Tennyson said ‘I am a part of all that I have met’ and I believe that to be true. Our experiences add to our depth and the people and things I’ve met in life are part of my story, including the art and…
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Inspired by artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s passion for wombats, every Friday is Wombat Friday at Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. “The Wombat is a Joy, a Triumph, a Delight, a Madness!” – Dante Gabriel Rossetti Once again it is #WombatFriday and this week, Thaddeus Diogenes Fern Wombat has been a worthy Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood assistant. He does have a…
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The hills grow darker to my sight And thoughts begin to swim. (from Elizabeth Siddal’s poem At Last) Lizzie was discovered in millinery shop, a simple girl who was tall for the time and had a mass of red-gold hair. Her first sitting was for Walter Deverell’s Twelfth Night. On this day in 1829, Elizabeth Eleanor…
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Sponsa de Libano is inspired by the Song of Solomon: ‘Awake O North wind; and come then south; blow upon my garden that the spices thereof may flow out.’ (Song of Solomon 4:16) “I drew the South wind one day and the North wind the next. Such a queer little model I had, a little…
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Inspired by artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s passion for wombats, every Friday is Wombat Friday at Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. “The Wombat is a Joy, a Triumph, a Delight, a Madness!” – Dante Gabriel Rossetti Thaddeus Fern Diogenes Wombat is a sleepy bloke today, but knowing his love for history and drama I’ve chosen to wake him up…
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William Morris’ Love is Enough has been on my mind this morning. “He makes a poem these days–in dismal Queen Square in black old filthy London in dull end of October he makes a pretty poem that is to be wondrously happy; and it has four sets of lovers in it and THEY ALL ARE HAPPY…
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Pictured above is A Lady Holding a Rose by Emma Sandys. Sadly little is known about Sandys in comparison to her more famous brother, Frederick. I recommend Serena Trowbridge’s post The Mysterious Emma Sandys. (If you are unfamiliar with Serena’s blog, Culture and Anarchy, I’m just going to go ahead and suggest that you should bookmark…
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Inspired by artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s passion for wombats, every Friday is Wombat Friday at Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. “The Wombat is a Joy, a Triumph, a Delight, a Madness!” – Dante Gabriel Rossetti In 2013, on a whim, I started Wombat Friday. For four years I have faithfully posted photos of toy wombats with Pre-Raphaelite art…
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One of my favorite posts on this site is Monstrous Women, where I briefly discuss my admiration for not only Mary Shelley, but women in fiction and myth that can be considered monstrosities. They pop up on Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood repeatedly. Lamia, for example, or Sidonia and Medusa. The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter…
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnet Life-in-Love fascinates me, especially when read with knowledge of two great loves in his life: Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris. The first two lines suggest that his deceased lover’s life has somehow migrated into the body of his new love: Not in thy body is thy life at all/But in…
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In 1865, Dante Gabriel Rossetti orchestrated a series of images of Jane Morris to be photographed by John Robert Parsons. While they are all interesting and beautiful to me, my favorite is the one above for one reason: that scarf. There’s a gauzy scarf that is seen repeatedly in Rossetti’s works. Here’s just a few…
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There’s a horror that sets in just before a new beginning. It can cripple you. The key is to understand the process. Like everything else in life, there are stages. First there’s fear. It is a cold fear that paralyzes. Dive into it with a rush, it is like plunging deep into freezing water…
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I’ve seen comments online that say the Pre-Raphaelites mainly appeal to adolescents. Even this 2007 piece from The Guardian quotes a senior curator at Tate Britain saying they’d have complaints from teenage girls if they didn’t show Pre-Raphaelite art. At first I bristled at this, knowing that it is a style of art that appeals to…
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Did you know Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir John Everett Millais wrote song lyrics? To Psyche “O Psyche, what a chance thou lost When Cupid was thy swain! Thou mightst have cut his tiny wings Too close to grow again, And cast his quiver far away, His crimson roses shorn Of cruel barbs, and left…
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Early Death by Elizabeth Siddal Oh grieve not with thy bitter tears The life that passes fast; The gates of heaven will open wide And take me in at last. Then sit down meekly at my side And watch my young life flee; Then solemn peace of holy death Come quickly unto thee. But true…
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Sometimes my reading life is haphazard and I dip into whatever strikes me fancy. (The right book, more often than not, seems to find me instead of the other way around.) Other times, I get a great deal of joy in creating an active reading plan to pursue. On Monday I posted William Michael Rossetti’s…
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I’ve been re-reading Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Family Letters, edited by his brother William Michael Rossetti. I was struck by this passage about DGR’s reading habits. First of all, I love William Michael’s descriptors. Saying Rossetti ‘drunk deep of an author’ and ‘surged through its pages like a flame’ presents a reading life that mirrors the…
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Artist Walter Crane was greatly influenced by Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelites. His painting The Horses of Neptune is an iconic image depicting the power of the sea. The god Neptune charges forward with his horses, who boldly rise from the waves. There’s not a specific narrative that I know of, but Neptune has long…
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Elizabeth Siddal made great contributions to the Pre-Raphaelite movement; she appears in a number of important works. After posing for Deverell, Holman Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti she bravely moved to the other side of the easel and became a Pre-Raphaelite artist in her own right. She has fascinated me throughout my adulthood and today I’d…
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Two of Sir Edward Burne-Jones’ largest projects were a series of paintings based on stories drawn from mythology and fairy tales: The Perseus Cycle and The Briar Rose series. In each series he created huge breathtaking panels that he worked on painstakingly for years. In this post, I’d like to focus on the armor found…
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These pre-shrunk Gildan brand shirts feature an image of Elizabeth Siddal at an easel, painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Buy yours today! Thank you for supporting PreRaphaeliteSisterhood.com. You can also follow on Twitter and Facebook.