Early Art Nouveau: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and His Circle

In 1849, the young poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti ( 1828-82) painted his first picture, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin. It started a movement in London which leads uninterruptedly and logically through half a century to Art Nouveau, thus marking a turning point in art history. For the first time, the latent tendencies that were to be realized in Art Nouveau made their existence known and emerged from prehistory into a historically comprehensible phase which deserves to be called "Early Art Nouveau."

We see here for the first time fancifully invented accessory objects, forms, and ornaments that could easily be imagined in an interior of about 1900, decorated in the Art Nouveau style of England, Holland, or Vienna. The ceramic vase on the pile of books, the glass vase on the balustrade, and the oil lamp beside it represent an early Art Nouveau style, with a return to simple basic forms in which nothing refers to historical examples; their closed and gliding outlines and their elongated proportions reveal their absolute opposition to the Victorian or Continental style which characterizes the applied arts of the middle of the nineteenth century. The abstract ornaments of the handled vase, with their linear ramifications as well as the geometrical ornaments at the upper border of the balustrade, come very close to the style of Scottish or Viennese High Art Nouveau and already tend toward the complementary attitude that was to become such a special feature of Art Nouveau.

In addition, the openwork of the balustrade's lower part has Gothic patterns; an individually interpreted Gothic style, simplified, it is true, to the point of almost resembling the Gothic of concrete castings of the end of the century such as Anatole de Baudot actually used in the nineties in his Church of Saint Jean, on the Place des Abbesses in Montmartre. In Rossetti's painting, the objects he represents and the style he adopts are entirely new. According to the aims pursued by the Pre-Raphaelite school, everything had to be represented in its details with the utmost realism, as the painters before Raphael had done; but what materializes as a result of this realism of details is a purely imaginative creation. The scene that is represented, the objects, and the new type of beauty in the faces of the figures are a personal invention of Rossetti's and the whole picture, in its formal construction too, has a character of its own that cannot be overlooked. Closed, simplified, and clear forms dominate the plane surface. Single forms, with the exception of the small leaves in the bower, are assembled in larger complexes of closed forms; the balustrade, the curtain, the books, the embroidery frame, and even the figure of the girl seen in profile, are not only arranged parallel to the plane of the picture but, moreover, everything that might appear in three-dimensional relief is reduced as far as possible to the flat and two-dimensional plane. Despite the realistic alternation of light and shadow, one can detect an endeavor to create homogeneous complexes closed in themselves by linear contours and set against each other in stark contrast. These structures are not yet "surface-bodies," flat forms homogeneous in themselves, but tend in this direction; one might even say that the real surface-bodies of the ornaments offer us the key for the interpretation of all the forms. Even the composition in itself forms an ornament; the picture is constructed in perpendicular and horizontal lines as well as right angles, so that the symbol of the Christian Cross, instead of being baldly represented, is integrated within the structure. The dry, unpainterly manner of applying the color as in a poster, and the artist's predilection for narrow, long, linear forms, differs from what is usual in the art of the period and is already essentially related to Art Nouveau.

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