THE PRE-RAPHAELITES (1848-1901)

 

The Ballad Of Lizzie Siddall

Dante Rossetti killed poor Lizzie Siddall,

But not with his hand or a gun or a knife.
No, he painted her and he promised her
And he betrayed her right out of her young life.

As he shortened her name by an ‘l’ to Siddal,

So he would shorten her cursed young life.
Her time with him was a heaven and a hell -
She was dead soon after he took her to wife.

 

Now, Elizabeth was born in London Town,
But she was raised down in society quite low.
She may just have been an unschooled shop-girl,
But she wrote and drew and her beauty seemed to glow.

Lizzie fell in with the Pre-Raphaelites,

Modelling for them while writing her own rhymes.
Dante Rossetti, he fell in love with Lizzie
And drew and painted her a thousand times.

She became one of The Brotherhood’s ‘stunners’,

Though she painted too and John Ruskin was her patron;
Along with Jane and Fanny, Annie and Alexa,
She was their mistress, their murderess, their maiden.

 

The PRB loved their flowing hair and pouting lips
And were mad for soulful Lizzie’s flaming red tresses
And they painted them into their classical scenes
Of damsels in distress, heroines and goddessses.

Everett Millais made Lizzie his Ophelia

And hour after hour, she shivered in his bath
Which passed for a cold, flower-strewn river,
Until poor Lizzie, she all but caught her death.

And Dante Rossetti made her his Beatrix

In the house where they lived in mortal sin
And although he loved her, he would leave her
For the arms of other ‘stunners’, time and again.

Lately stricken by a fit of guilty conscience,

Did Dante Rossetti at last Lizzie wed,
But only in a lowly hole in the corner way
After she had been ten long years in his bed.

Then Lizzie sickened, her babe was stillborn,

Yet the flames burned as old in her fiery mane,
But Dante Rossetti turned to his new muse -
Another man’s wife, the raven-haired Jane.

 

And the world saw this other ‘stunner’s face
Gazing out from all his blazing pictures
And poor Lizzie, left to her own devices,
Became addicted to deadly mixtures.

 

One poisonous potion did Lizzie drink,
Her pale withering looks to recover
And another for to dull the heart broken
By the husband no longer her lover.

He buried Lizzie in Highgate, London,

Along with his poems in a journal;
Killed by heartbreak and arsenic and laudanum,
She sank while he prayed for her rest eternal.

In a passion of fine romantic grief,
He placed his book of poems under her heavy head,
Swearing that it would die with the babe inside her,
As she was lowered down to her death bed.

 

Dante Rossetti, like his Lizzie, took to drugs.
When his resurrected poems were decried,
He overdosed on whiskey and laudanum,
But unlike Lizzie, he survived his suicide.

Then some time later, Dante Rossetti

Decided his oh so precious journal to save,
So back to Highgate for the coffin he went,
And raised up poor Lizzie where she lay in the grave.

When they opened up the coffin in wonder,

They looked down upon the cold Elizabeth
With her hair still red and grown longer still -
Almost as lovely in life did she prove in death.

Well, famed Dante Rossetti published his poems

And dallied for years with the sable-haired Jane
And Sarah - another low-born ‘stunner’ like Lizzie -
But for all his glory, grief found him out again.

He was losing his hair and too much of his sleep,

And now he took to chloral nitrate and whiskey.
When at last he died, he was not an old man,
But he was not nearly so young as poor Lizzie.

Yes, Dante Rossetti killed poor Lizzie Siddall,

But not with his hand or a gun or a knife.
No, he painted her and he promised her

And he betrayed her right out of her young life.

(2015)

I couldn't decide on a particular artist to write about, but then it came to me that the tragic story of Elizabeth Siddall might work as the sort of gothic ballad that so inspired the painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (who, at the outset of their movement, signed their paintings 'PRB'). There was the odd Pre-Raphelite picture after the Victorian period, although it is generally seen as a Victorian art movement - hence the dates 1848 (when William Holman Hunt's 'The Eve Of Saint Agnes' was first exhibited) and 1901 (the end of the Victorian era). 

The picture above is Gabriel Dante Rossetti's 'Beata Beatrix' with Siddall as his poet namesake's doomed heroine Beatrix. Lizzie was doomed too - as symbolised by the bird of ill omen dropping a poppy into her hands (opium being a key ingredient of laudanum, one of the drugs that killed her).

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973)

 

For the sake of argument, blame it on Picasso -

The long slide down into the black hole
Of Cubism, doodling and abstraction –
Vaguely Miro, very Rothko.

And whilst admiring his sheer brio  -

The elegance of line, exuberant colour
And formality of composition -
It is always with that proviso.

Pictures turning reductively into patterns -

Klimt slipping into Kandinsky
And Kandinsky trickling into Klee -
Vaguely Matisse, very Mondrian.

Minimalism and gimmickry

Becoming the market’s order of the day
And, as with haute couture, modern art
Turning away from people and into easy money.

Thus fashion wins over art and application,

Whilst Picasso’s paradox states that
‘Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth’ -
If you can but see through his fabrication.

So applaud his balls and bravado,

His modernity and iconoclasm,
But remember the void he opened
And blame it all on Picasso.

(2015)

 

At the risk of sounding like a philistine, I've never been much taken with Picasso - not even 'Guernica', which seems to impress most people. The above poem, though, is not meant to be taken entirely seriously. I'm not one of those people who dismiss modern art lock, stock and barrel but, at the same time, I do believe a great deal of charlatanry has taken hold since Picasso appeared. The painting, 'Mediterranean Landscape' used here, is however, one his I do admire.

BANKSY ( ? )

O Mystery Man, who are you
With your stencils and spray can?
Are you a vandal or a vampire
That only ventures out at night,
Wearing, perhaps, a helmet with a light?

A rioter throws a bouquet;

An athlete throws a bomb;
That little Vietnamese napalm girl
Is taken for walk, holding hands
With Ronald McDonald and Micky Mouse.
There’s kissing cops as Christ shops ‘til he drops;
A street-cleaner spraying over cave paintings
And another covering up Pink Floyd’s Wall.
Mona Lisa turns, lifts her skirt, shows her bum,
And there round the corner is Queen Victoria in heels
And suspenders, getting head from a lesbian chum
While a Royal Guardsmen pisses up another wall.
The Grim Reaper appears on a Bristol pleasure boat;
A hoodie runs off with an Olympic ring;
And a child’s balloon is the letter ‘o’ in ‘No Future’.
A graffiti kid remembers when this was all trees
As seas rise in warning, threatening to submerge
The legend, ‘I don’t believe in global warming’.

Not just another arsehole with an aerosol

Then, who can neither draw nor write,
Scribbling and dribbling pathetic tags
Like long-lasting litter or dog-shite:
Not simply then, yet more urban blight.

But Banksy, you mystic of the mural -

Are you singular or are you plural?
Turning antics into antiques, what a nerve!
But maybe you’re right, in the end, to aver
That society gets the kind of vandalism it deserves.

(2015)

 

I had started showing these 'painter poems' to a couple of friends and one of them suggested I 'do Banksy', which might not have occurred to me - happily, I think it turned out quite well so thanks for the suggestion Professor Newsinger. 

J. M. W. TURNER (1755-1851)

 

The quiet canals

And sunbathed ruins

Of his stately classical style

Melt into the later whirl

Of colour and instinct

                                                 That will become

The new world

Of Impressionism;

The indistinct now his forte.

 And he is away:

His vision going where it will

Without constraint.

Ships with skulls for hulls

Pulled into the harbour

For the last time;

A steam train in the rain;

Blizzards and blazes;

Mist and hazes;

Eruptions, fog and typhoon;

Waves and wrecks and cloudwrack

And human figures - though faint -

Almost lost

Amidst the torrential blur.

 Black sails in the sunset;

Golden days before they end;

                                        A brilliant yellow zig-zag

Splashes without precedent on a lake; 

Sunset, moonrise, nightfall, daybreak:

And Turner is in his element,

In the eye of the vortex;

Spinning the weathers

In his revolution of paint.

(2015)

Three years ago when I began what has turned into this series, the artist I most wanted to write a poem about was Turner - but it simply wouldn't come. It finally arrived in the spate of poems which came out in late 2015. The picture - referred to in the final verse - is sometimes simply called Scarlet Sunset, sometimes Sunset at Rouen.

CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)

 

 

 
 

 

A long way from Giverny,
On my park of the ruined abbey,
I cross the white stone bridge
As it glitters over the River Soar
And walk to the boating lake.
Through the oriental garden I go,
Crossing little wooden bridges
Painted red and green amidst trees,
Over lily ponds and nesting swans
And think of Monet afloat in his studio

Dreaming of ladies with parasols

Who gaze out to sea from cliff tops
In big hats and long white dresses.
He recalls maybe haystacks in a heat haze
And poppies cascading down slopes;
Sunshine blinding through a door
Opening on dappled paths in full bloom.
In his mind’s eye, the incandescent snow
On sunlit winter fields before it’s gone;
Glimpsing trains steaming into stations
And a peasouper London Parliament
Blazing in his fading memory’s store
Where Impression Sunrise awoke, perhaps,
From Turner’s Scarlet Sunrise at Rouen.

In the rising and the dying of the light,

The angles shifting this way, that way,
The scenes painted over and again.
Waiting for the weather to change
And the seasons to turn and turn again,
His eyes flicker like those of Turner,
Faltering with age, rubbed staring sore
As they strain at the blurring palette,
But still catching what they saw and more
In their half colour blind cataracts of light.

 

 

 The picture above the poem is Impression Sunrise - the painting often credited with starting the movement of Impressionism. Turner's Scarlet Sunset accompanies my Turner poem on this blog.

The one at the bottom here is, of course, part of the series of numerous studies of his later garden at Giverny by Monet himself. When taking photographs of the garden in Abbey Park mentioned in the poem, I've produced a few quite passable imitations - one of which can be viewed on the Photo Gallery of this blog.

 

(IGR 2015)

 

JOSEPH WRIGHT OF DERBY (1734-97)

He catches something, perhaps,
In Darwin’s grandfather and Arkwright:

If not enlightenment,
Then something out of the ordinary
Of his other, blander portraits.
Meanwhile, as the old light of the world dims.
His destiny shapes in the twilight, waiting to show.
Shadow and light, light and shadow,
Chiaroscuro, chiaroscuro.

 By candles and lamps,
Children’s faces are lit
In pleasure and wonder
Above an orrery of moons and planets,
Or as a letter is read,
Or girls dress a kitten,
Or a boy blows up a bladder
And an alchemist boils urine
In the ball of a flaring flask
Inside what may be a church,
Whilst what might be a sun
Rising or setting, frames an Indian widow
Lamenting her husband

And perhaps a whole way of life.
Chanting long and low;
Light and shadow, light and shadow,

Chiaroscuro, chiaroscuro.

 Not much interested in sunlight,
It was fire that fascinated Wright:
Candles and lanterns in the night;
Forges and fireworks;
Flames and phosphorous;
Vulcan’s white-hot spear,
Tossed out of Vesuvius
Into cavernous clouds of smoke
And the blacksmith’s crowded shop
Where a white-hot iron bar
Is hammered in the sparkle and glow;
Shadow and light, light and shadow,
Chiaroscuro, chiaroscuro.

 But moonlight is never far away:
If the sun was God for Turner,
Then the moon was Wright’s goddess.
See it there in the room where the scientist
With his air-pump suffocates the bird under glass
To the horror of the children,
But note the boy in the corner at a curtain,
Revealing the moon through the window.
In the sea caves of the painter’s brain,
He gazes out - like that same scientist -
At moons over dark sails and lighthouses
And above a bridge and a volcano.
Shadow and light, light and shadow,
Chiaroscuro, chiaroscuro.

 (2015)

 

The painting is An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump and can be seen - along with several of the other pictures referred to here - in the excellent Derby Museum & Art Gallery.