Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Bedroom at Tudor House, 16 Cheyne Walk
Henry Treffry Dunn (Truro 1838 - 1899)
Category
Art / Drawings and watercolours
Date
1872 (dated by WMR on reverse)
Materials
Watercolour on paper
Measurements
430 mm (Diameter)
Order this imageCollection
Wightwick Manor, West Midlands
NT 1287978
Caption
Dante Gabriel Rossetti moved to Tudor House at 16 Cheyne Walk after the death of his wife, furnishing it in his own unique style and installing a menagerie of exotic animals. Over the two decades he spent there he gradually became more depressed and reclusive. Henry Treffry Dunn, Rossetti’s personal secretary and studio assistant, painted this ingenious picture of the artist’s bedroom as seen in one of the many convex mirrors in the house, the shadowy and distorted reflection conveying an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. It shows the four-poster bed and the overmantel crowded with the blue-and-white porcelain that was a key element in many Aesthetic interiors. Dunn thought the bedroom ‘a most unhealthy place to sleep’, mentioning ‘Thick curtains heavy with crewel work in designs of print and foliage hung closely drawn round an antiquated four-post bedstead’ and the additional clutter of bronze ‘Chinese monstrosities’ and vases filled with peacock feathers and brass repoussé dishes.
Summary
Watercolour on paper, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Bedroom at Tudor House, 16 Cheyne Walk by Henry Treffry Dunn (Truro 1838 - 1899), inscribed, bottom left and right, in ink: Cheyne Walk & Gabriel's Bedroom, and by William Michael Rossetti on reverse: 1872. A circular watercolour of Rossetti's bedroom, by his studio assistant, with fireplace and four-poster bed, is seen reflected in convex mirror. The chimneypiece was built up to Rossetti's directions.
Full description
For many of the artists associated with the Aesthetic movement, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti (who had 24 mirrors in his Chelsea home, nine of which were convex), mirrors provided the link between the imaginative world of the painting and the internal world of the artist. A defence perhaps against objective realism, the convex mirror assisted Rossetti in his mission to uphold an aesthetic that refracted prosaic reality into something more private and mysterious. The shift towards painting in a more suggested way among artists in the Rossetti circle allowed them to underscore the unreality of images. The idea of the modern Aesthetic interior as a space for indulging private fantasy and reverie is conveyed in this watercolour made by Rossetti’s personal secretary and studio assistant, Henry Treffry Dunn, of the artist’s bedroom at Cheyne Walk. Here the painting itself assumes the form of a convex mirror, exaggerating the bulging contours of the bed curtains to capture something of the enclosed introspective nature of Rossetti’s lifestyle and the swelling limbs of the ideal female portraits for which he became well known. Text adapted from Reflections: Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites, National Gallery Company, London, 2017: pp. 52-3; 83.
Provenance
William Michael Rossetti (1829 – 1919); thence by descent to his daughter, Helen Maria Rossetti, Mrs Gastone Angeli (1879 - 1969) and her daughter Imogene Angeli, Mrs Dennis (d. 1993); on loan to Wightwick Manor from her daughter, Helen Dennis, Mrs Guglielmini and given to the National Trust by her in November 2001
Marks and inscriptions
Dated 1872 (written by WMR, further details written on reverse)
Makers and roles
Henry Treffry Dunn (Truro 1838 - 1899), artist
Exhibition history
Reflections: Jan van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites, National Gallery, London, 2017 - 2018 The Cult of Beauty: Aesthetic Movement in Britain, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 2011 - 2012 The Cult of Beauty: Aesthetic Movement in Britain, Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 2011 - 2012
References
Smith 2017: Alison Smith, Reflections: Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites (exh.cat.), London: National Gallery Company, 2017., pp. 52-3; 83