Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in his back garden by Max Beerbohm from The Poet’s Corner (1904).

This delightful plate depicting the circle of painters and poets surrounding Dante Gabriel Rossetti (none of whom, as Beerbohm reminds us, he had ever met) caricatures those associated with both the early Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and aesthetic Preraphaelitism. Starting with Rossetti, who appears sketching Fanny Cornforth at lower left, and continuing counter-clockwise, the figures are J. M. Whistler, A. C. Swinburne, Theodore Watts-Dunton, George Meredith, William Morris, William Bell Scott, William Holman Hunt, John Ruskin, and Fanny Cornforth, Rossetti's mistress and model; Sir Edward Burne Jones presents as flower to a kangaroo. Somewhat oddly, Christina Rossetti is absent, as are key members of the original Brotherhood, including Sir John Everett Millais, Thomas Woolner, and F. G. Stephens [George P. Landow and Dennis Lanigan].


Created 13 March 2006

Ladt Modified 13 February 2022