4267. RB to William Michael Rossetti
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 25, 268–269.
Florence.
4 November 1858.
Dear Mr. Rossetti,
Allingham writes to me that you would be content, out of the kindness of your heart, to superintend the engraving of a photograph of my wife [1] which I am anxious should be well done. There are caricatures extant, published indeed both in England and America, which induced her to sit to the sun; and, as the result is quite his own, without retouching, I want to put so much of the truth in evidence as such a photograph affords. There is too much shadow and exaggeration about the corners of the mouth, the eyes have iris and pupil run into one blackishness, the hair is wanting in the shadows that characterize it, and there’s a bit of white looking like a clerical band which is the white background left white: but, for all these things, the whole is like, so I want the engraver to keep it so.
Will you really look after this for us? Allingham assures us that you will, and my own remembrances reassure us, so I ask the favour. There’s your brother, and Woolner, for instance—our dear friends, we well know—but I trust they are busied with engravers on their own account.
You will be glad to know that my wife is much better (she was very unwell in the spring). We go to Rome in a week or ten days. Her kind regard goes with mine.
Yours faithfully ever,
Robert Browning.
Text: William Michael Rossetti, Ruskin: Rossetti: Preraphaelitism; Papers 1854 to 1862 (London, 1899), pp. 210–211.
1. See the sixth to last paragraph in letter 4259.
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