Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in his back garden

Max Beerbohm

Date: c. 1904

Materials: Watercolour over pencil, pen and ink

Red torch in fog

The most famous caricaturist of his time, Max Beerbohm found a rich source of subjects in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, although he only ever met a few of its members in their later years. He particularly admired Rossetti, as a character born out of his time, whomight have seemed less remarkable "in the Quattrocento and by the Arno. But in London, in the great days of a deep, smug, thick, drab, industrial complacency, Rossetti shone, for the men and women who knew him, with the ambiguous light of a red torch somewhere in a dense fog".

Vague synthesis

This caricature was made for Beerbohm's second book, 'The Poets' Corner', published in 1904. It is not, of course, intended to represent any actual occasion, but to highlight the incongruous mixture of Rossetti's circle of friends and his fondness for keeping exotic animals in the garden of his Chelsea house (he did own a kangaroo, as well as a Japanese salamander and a wombat).

This is Beerbohm's identification of the figures: "Background, from left to right: Swinburne, Theodore Watts [afterwards Watts-Dunton], Meredith, Hall Caine. In front of the wall on the left: Whistler. With the kangaroo: Burne-Jones. Upright and reciting: William Morris. On the right: Holman Hunt, and in front of him, in profile: Ruskin. In the foreground: Rossetti. The lady is no one in particular, just a vague synthesis."