Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) Desdemonas Death Song: a fragment oil on canvas laid on board 16 x 14 ½ in. (40.5 x 36.8 cm.) Desdemonas Death-Song was an ambitious composition in which the heroine was to be shown singing the so-called Willow Song as she prepares for bed on the fateful night when she was smothered by Othello in a fit of jealousy (Othello, Act IV, Scene 3). Her faithful maid, Emilia, stood beside her, combing out her long hair. Rossetti was planning the work as early as March 1872, intending it for F.R. Leyland, the wealthy shipowner who was one of his staunchest patrons, and visualising a canvas moderate life-size in scale. He continued to make studies over the next decade; a particularly fine one was sold in these Rooms on 24 November 2004, lot 4, and is now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York (fig. 1). But the picture itself, though started, was never completed. The present painting, showing the head of Desdemona, is a fragment cut from that unfinished canvas. Discussing the composition in his book Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer (1889), William Michael Rossetti wrote: He did not, I think, actually begin painting it on the canvas, but he must have come very near to so doing. This is all the more puzzling given that William Michael himself owned our fragment. H.C. Marillier was more accurate in his great Rossetti monograph of 1899, observing that a beginning was made to paint the subject on canvas. In fact D.G. Rossetti himself had mentioned the unfinished painting. On 28 March 1882, during his last illness at Birchington-on-Sea, he had dictated a letter to the critic F.G. Stephens, who had written enquiring as to a subject picture. Rossetti replied that he did indeed have one on hand, having designed and begun painting lately a good sized picture of Desdemona singing the Willow Song while Emilia dresses her hair. Lately implies that the fragment was one of his very last works. Within a fortnight he was dead, and the touching belief he had expressed to Stephens, that the picture would certainly be one of my best and most attractive things, was never realised.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 07:14:27 +0000
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