SD2979. Diary Entry of William Michael Rossetti
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 387 (in part).
[London]
Tuesday, 28 April 1868
… I called at Browning’s to deliver to Miss Browning a letter from Stillman, and to give Browning the photograph from La Farge’s design of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. B[rowning] was not in. Miss B[rowning] showed me various items of interest in the way of pictures etc., also the owl. She detests Woolner’s Medallion of B[rowning], objecting especially to a degree of projection given to the under-lip. B[rowning]’s first intimacy with the Storys arose through his giving himself up wholly to attending to their then only Son in his last illness. The pictures include a portrait, by Wright of Derby, of B[rowning]’s Grandmother, who must have been a strikingly handsome woman; a portrait by Hogarth of Thornhill—a poorish picture, and I should think its genuineness not beyond question; a Rembrandt which I am satisfied is not a Rembrandt. None of these, I take it, is B[rowning]’s own acquisition. Among those of his own purchasing is an old Italian picture—God the Father with Angels—on panel in three compartments. He had the luck to get these three compartments one here and one there: they undoubtedly form one picture.
Publication: Rossetti Papers, 1862 to 1870, comp. William Michael Rossetti (London, 1903), pp. 306–307.
Manuscript: University of British Columbia.
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