3816. RB to Dante Gabriel Rossetti
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 7.
39 Devonshire Place
Tuesday. [?8] [July 1856] [1]
Dear Rossetti,
Your kind brother proposes to bring us to the honor & better of knowing Mr Hunt next Thursday Eg [2] Will you come if he does, or when he does?
I have your “Rachel and Leah” [3] —lent & sent—the good thought!
Ever yours faithfully,
Robert Browning
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Dating suggested by RB’s mention of William Michael Rossetti’s proposal to introduce William Holman Hunt to the Brownings. In a diary entry of 6 July 1856, Ford Madox Brown recorded that Hunt, W.M. Rossetti, and Thomas Woolner had called and that the latter two were on their way to visit RB (see SD1939). Conceivably, W.M. Rossetti made the proposal during that visit.
2. Many years later Hunt recounted this meeting in his Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (New York and London, 1906): “Browning was taller than he had been described to me, perhaps about five feet six, robust and hearty in his tone of interest in all questions discussed, but I felt some self-reproach in so faintly recognizing in him the stamp of a man as elevated above his fellows as his noblest poems proved him to be. Mrs Browning was also small, and, with this, fragile; she betrayed nervous anxiety in her eager manner, so that the supersensitive tenor of her poems seemed fitly embodied in her. Her hair was brought forward in ringlets on her face in a manner quite out of fashion, and thus helped to make one feel that she disregarded all changes of mode since her youth. The special interest of the evening was the production of a poem by their son, aged about six, the subject Leighton’s picture of ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ [‘The Triumph of Music’]. It was, even taking the child’s parentage into consideration, a wonderful example of precocity” (II, 125–126). Pen’s verses were entitled “The Poem of the Picture of Mr. Leighton” (see Reconstruction, L56).
3. “Dante’s Vision of Rachel and Leah” (1855), a watercolour by Rossetti (now at the Tate Gallery, London), was commissioned by John Ruskin, who bought it for £30 but later sold it to Ellen Heaton (see Rossetti, 2, 63n).
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