I recently saw Rossettis'
The Blue Bower (1865), currently on loan from the
Barber Institute at the
Courtauld Gallery. The artist's model and subsequent mistress - Fanny Cornforth - was but one of several such 'stunners' whose beauty was caught in the mesmerizing paintings they inspired. With her rich russet hair, tumbling down, her prominent neck and rose-bud mouth, Fanny was very much Rossetti's 'type'. However, I would say that the likenesses all of the women whom he painted seem to blend together to capture his aesthetic ideal. Although they were different from one another - these women shared a particular uniqueness or Rossetti delivered their image in such a manner so as to highlight this. The long, tumbling hair that was truly a 'crowning glory', the distinctive nose, the expressive, ever-parted lips, the pale eyelashes visible in the light,
the tapering fingers that are so eloquent are all the key features in the portraits of his women.
Surrounded by exotic Chinese cherry-blossom blue tiles, and the intertwined flowers and tendrils of the passionflower, Fanny gazes out onto us as her fingers pluck the strings of a Japanese instrument, the
koto. Her expression is hard to define - she appears timeless and uncompromising in all her splendour, further enhanced by the jewel-like colours typical in the rendition of Pre-Raphaelite art. Born in 1835, at thirty years old, Fanny Cornforth, is indeed stunning, as she is in Rossetti's
Bocca Baciata (Lips That Have Been Kissed). Yet these richly painted images that convey an idealized, sensual beauty and untainted, other-worldly purity were far removed from the harsher, lacklustre realities of Fanny's life.
From a modest background, she had to work throughout her life, as a servant, housekeeper and, of course, artist's model. Her outspoken nature and supposedly limited grasp of the social niceties deemed essential to a decent Victorian lady, meant that Fanny was never fully accepted by Rossetti's entourage. Yet what she may perhaps have lacked in education and breeding, she made up for in her looks in youth and a certain devotion to the friendship that she maintained with Rossetti until the end, when his family drove her from his home. Fanny did marry twice, but this did not lead to any long-term security so that poverty and ill-health resulted in her final years being spent in a mental asylum where she was ultimately buried in a collective grave.
Before and after death, her name was frequently sullied by rumours of immoral behaviour and inappropriate manner during her lifetime with and without Rossetti, and the last photograph of her in old age bears no ressemblance to the woman she had once been; the hair, mouth and nose are in no way distinctive features. And yet the paintings live on, in their opulence, capturing the idealized lover and muse that she had at one time incorporated, like passionflowers bursting out into the sunlight in their extravagant glory before sundown.
