From the House of Life to the Decorative Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ceramics

The recent “Cult of Beauty” touring exhibition (Victorian and Albert Museum, 13 September 2011, 15 January 2012) has convincingly shown the role such key pre-Raphaelite artists as Dante Gabriel Rossetti played in the transition from the mid-Victorian age to British aestheticism by dedicating much space to such emblematic paintings as Bocca Baciata (1859) or The Day Dream (1880). However, Rossetti’s exact artistic involvement with the Arts and Crafts design movement, which emerged in Britain around 1860 (but only took its official name after the foundation of the Crafts Exhibition Society in 1887) and his exploration of lesser forms of art in his own artistic career have not yet been widely examined: how could the leader of the Preraphaelite Brotherhood—an artistic endeavour renowned for its insistence on transparent, true-to-nature symbolism—have inspired the decorative, overcharged designs and furniture of the Arts and Crafts movement? Did Rossetti’s art also move towards aestheticism, and if so, does this change the way we should interpret his paintings and his poetry?This paper hopes to address these issues by looking at Rossetti’s experiments with mixed media, with a special focus on Rossetti’s interest in and collecting of ceramics. It also aims to look at Rossetti’s artistic production in a broad and inclusive manner and to balance his ideas against those expressed by John Ruskin in his conferences on art and architecture in the mid-1850s