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Wei Wei Yeo
National University of Singapore

'Each in Other's Eyes / Is Imaged All Alone': Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Art of Frames

The ornate richness of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painterly aesthetic makes for sumptuous and unsparing works of art. Apart from the unfinished Found (1854-), Rossetti's pictures in the 1870s consist of half-length or three-quarter-length portraits of women, the majority of them life-size and solitary. There is the same unstinting eye for detail as in the watercolours which had established Rossetti as painter in the 1850s, but these female oil portraits provoke a different sort of response. Standing before the watercolours, the spectator is inclined or indeed invited to piece a narrative together from what is represented on the canvas. For the female portraits, the temporality of the subject is a moment rather than a sequence. Every detail in the painting works to focus the spectator on the very moment in which the woman is pictured. In my paper I explore Dante Gabriel Rossetti's mediation of the moment of encounter between spectator and work of art through picture-frame design and eckphrasis with reference to Proserpina and La Donna della Finestra. There is a consummate stillness about these portraits which seems to say to the spectator that whatever came before or after this moment of arrest is beside the point; beyond what is visible in the painting, beyond what is expressed and contained within its confines, all else is irrelevant.