Rossetti's striking memorial picture to Lizzie , Beata Beatrix was completed in 1870, the year after Rossetti arranged Lizzie's exhumation to retrieve the manuscript of poetry he had buried with her .
Beata Beatrix is often considered as a show of devotion or cathartic expression of Rossetti's grief but some scholars have suggested that this interpretation is part of the romantic myth around the Siddal/Rossetti relationship promoted by his brother William. Jan Marsh has described it as a "memorial picture' which 'in feeling and general iconography ... accords with Victorian funerary practice'. The finished work proved popular and Rossetti produced six copies.
It has been suggested that Beata Beatrix may well have been based on a re-working of a previous sketch by Rossetti ( click on link) started, possibly in 1850's well before her death.
Beata Beatrix is often considered as a show of devotion or cathartic expression of Rossetti's grief but some scholars have suggested that this interpretation is part of the romantic myth around the Siddal/Rossetti relationship promoted by his brother William. Jan Marsh has described it as a "memorial picture' which 'in feeling and general iconography ... accords with Victorian funerary practice'. The finished work proved popular and Rossetti produced six copies.
It has been suggested that Beata Beatrix may well have been based on a re-working of a previous sketch by Rossetti ( click on link) started, possibly in 1850's well before her death.
According to one contemporary Bessie Rayner Parkes , the finished painting did not look like Lizzie. 'The expression of Beatrice was not hers,' , 'and when I look at the famous Beatrice in the National Gallery, I feel puzzled by the manner in which the artist took the head and shoulders of a remarkably retiring English girl, with whom I was perfectly familiar, and transfused them with an expression in which I could recognize nothing of the moral nature of Miss Siddal.'
The Tate Gallery (London) website provides the following information on Beata Beatrix::
It has a hazy, transcendental quality, giving the sensation of a dream or vision, and is filled with symbolic references. Rossetti intended to represent her, not at the moment of death, but transformed by a 'sudden spiritual transfiguration' (Rossetti, in a letter of 1873, quoted in Wilson, p.86). She is posed in an attitude of ecstasy, with her hands before her and her lips parted, as if she is about to receive Communion. According to Rossetti's friend F.G. Stephens, the grey and green of her dress signify 'the colours of hope and sorrow as well as of love and life' Source Tate Gallery
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rossetti-beata-beatrix-n01279
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| © Tate CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported) Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Beata Beatrix c1864-70 |
DG Rossetti Beata Beatrix 1864-70
