“To Caper Nimbly in a Lady's Chamber/ To the Lascivious Pleasing of a Lute”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

General Description

Date: 1850

Bibliography

◦ Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body (1998), 86-88.

◦ Marillier, DGR: An Illustrated Memorial, 38.

◦ Surtees, A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1, 15.

Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

“As originally conceived the pen and ink composition of 1850 . . . of a group of people in a woman's chamber . . . was to illustrate the lines from Richard III (I. 1. 12-13)” (Surtees I. 15). But in 1851 DGR made his Borgia watercolour from this drawing, and from that point he continued to think of and develop the work as a scene from his idea of the Borgia family rather than in relation to the Shakespeare text. According to George Boyce, who bought the watercolour in 1853 or 1854, DGR regarded the drawing as “one of the best drawings he ever did” (quoted in Surtees I. 15).

Electronic Archive Edition: 1
Source File: s47.raw.xml