3864. RB to Thomas Woolner
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 63–64.
3 Parade, West Cowes.
[ca. 19 September 1856] [1]
My dear Woolner,
Your kind & pleasant note has just reached me: our stay here ends on Monday; thence we proceed for (perhaps) a week to Taunton; and the remaining fortnight—the Autumn-half of October—we shall pass at Devonshire-Place. Who knows but you may return before we set out for Italy again? You make it seem a long journey now—taking us, as it does, from such kind faces, and admirable right-hands. The first thing I shall do, will be to write to Rossetti. In any case, believe I carry away memories I run no risk of losing in another year’s absence—if it is to be that, and no longer. And my wife, (here, correcting proofs at my elbow) bids me thank you as heartily, and promise for her to remember us entirely. You must know how we shall watch your ways, that have begun so– On the whole, I hope to see you before we go: if that may not be, send the cast when you please [2] —and have the goodness not to forget my commission of the frames [3] —which the maker can leave– And you shall have one good bye word from
Yours faithfully ever
Robert Browning.
Publication: Amy Woolner, Thomas Woolner, R.A., Sculptor and Poet: His Life in Letters (London, 1917), pp. 120–121 (as October 1856).
Manuscript: Bodleian Library.
1. Dating suggested by RB’s reference to leaving West Cowes on Monday; that is, 22 September 1856.
2. Doubtless a plaster cast of the medallion portrait of RB that Woolner had completed by 25 August 1856 (see SD1960), but which he afterwards slightly modified (see letter 3900). The medallion was later cast in bronze, copies of which are now at Birmingham and ABL (see Reconstruction, G13 and G14). The one at ABL had been in the possession of William Michael Rossetti and was acquired from his daughter in 1935. Rossetti writes of the medallion: “The precise contour of the features is rendered with an exactitude and an emphasis … and the well-known precision of the artist is our guarantee for crediting its accuracy in these respects. It is remarkable, considering that this is a work of sculpture, that the eye is made the most expressive feature of all; it seems to look, with a steady glance of scrutiny and almost of challenge, into men and things” (“Portraits of Robert Browning.—I,” The Magazine of Art, 13, May 1890, 187). The medallion is reproduced as the frontispiece to this volume.
3. Presumably, these frames were for the plaster casts of Woolner’s medallion of RB (see note 2 above) and of his medallion of Alfred Tennyson, which the sculptor had presented to the Brownings on 23 July 1856, and which they “meant to have … framed” (see SD1947). The two casts may have been part of the “Three Profile Heads” by Woolner that sold as lot 1393 in Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, H281). They are described as “plaster, on circular bases, in maple-wood frames”—present whereabouts unknown.
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