This is Rossetti’s finished drawing for ‘King Arthur in the Vale of Avalon.’ The lamenting queens have the same face and luxuriant hair – Lizzie Siddal’s – and these portraits are framed in fantastical medieval costumes and accoutrements. The death-barge is arriving to take Arthur away, and in the background, in tiny detail, is his tomb. Time past, present and future have thus been conflated, but Rossetti suggests that Arthur will be renewed and reoccupy the present, a notion exemplified by the writhing plant-life in the foreground; he may be dying, but he will live again. Pen and brown ink. 82 x 92 mm. The drawing was engraved by the Dalziels and published as the second image for ‘The Palace of Art’ in Tennyson’s Poems (London: Moxon, 1857), 113. The finished print is not an exact replica of the drawing, with some details being slightly different from the original, but is accurate for the most part.
Scanned image by the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, UK. Reproduced under the terms of Creative Commons. Caption, text and formatting by Simon Cooke. You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you acknowledge the Birmingham Museum as the source of the image. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
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Created 7 August 2025