The Question

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Date: 1875

Materials: Pencil 

Oddest work

'The Question' is one of Rossetti's oddest yet most accomplished works. As asophisticated exercise in brilliantly gradated pencil drawing, nothing quite like it appears in nineteenth-century British art, and in terms of technical achievement it represents anextraordinary contrast with the artist's naive and awkward early draughts-manship. He may have intended to turn it into a painting, but none was ever begun. 

To be or not to be

The subject is a personal variation on the riddle of the Sphinx. While the answer to her question, "What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in theevening?" remains Man (in infancy, adulthood and old age, walking with a stick), Rossetti adds this gloss: "In the symbolism of the picture (which is clear and gives its title founded on Shakespeare's great line "To be or not to be", that is the question) the swoon of theyouth may be taken to shadow forth the mystery of early death, one of the hardest of impenetrable dooms".

This idea may have derived from the recent death of Oliver, son of Ford Madox Brown, at the age of only twenty in November 1874.