The Collecting Eye of Seymour Stein

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Lot 6
  • 6

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

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Description

  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
  • The Return of Tibullus to Delia

  • signed with monogram and dated 1851 (lower right); titled and inscribed with eight lines in Latin from Tibullus on the reverse

  • watercolor and gouache on artist's board

  • 9 1/2 by 12 in.
  • 24.1 by 31.6 cm

Provenance

Siddons Gallery, Paddington Green

Terence W.G. Rowe Collection

The Stone Gallery, Newcastle -upon-Tyne

Exhibited

London, Rossetti Gallery, no. 10

London, Leighton Art Gallery, The Pre-Raphaelite Influence,1960, no. 71

London, The Royal Academy of Arts, Rossetti Exhibition 1973, no. 252

Literature

Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Oxford, 1971, vol. 1, no. 62, p. 24, illustrated vol. 2, no. 56.

Catalogue Note

Rossetti depicts the passage in Tibullus (Elegies, I, 3, 82-92) whenTibullus bids to his mistress to await his return:

'Live chaste, dear love; and while I'm far away,

Be some old dame thy guardian night and day.

She'll sing thee songs, and when the lamp is lit,

Fly the full rock and draw long threads from it,

So, unannouced, shall I come suddenly,

As 'twere a presence sent from heaven to thee.

Then as thou art, all long and loose they hair,

Run to me, Delia, run with thy feet bare.'