Eleven Dante Gabriel Rossetti Prints, Lady on Red Recolours

Title Eleven Dante Gabriel Rossetti Prints, Base Game "Lady on Red" Recolours


August 10th, 2015 HiRes Upgrade

For a 10% increase in filesize, both the colour and monochrome sets have been substantially improved.


Description

The base game "Lady on Red" is one of the most popular paintings for recolouring, and with good reason. The 256 wide by 343 pixel size works out to a 3 to 4 or 0.75 aspect ratio that adapts itself well to many portrait sized images. However the silver colour frame is not particularly suitable for displaying classical art. To suit this purpose I adapted the frame from the "Red vs. Blue Oil Portrait" to this format, and along the way made seven recolours of the original metallic frame. These alternate frames, together with instructions, are posted in bella_framing_kit.zip, and are available for your free use. This kit is designed for use with the SimPE Object Workshop.

"Lady on Red" costs §180, and has an Environment value of 2. These eleven Rossetti artworks are distributed in rossetti_lady_red.zip. In addition, seven of these proved suitable for conversion to grey-scale, for use in Retroville type scenarios, and these are available in rossetti_lady_grey.zip. So here is the latest collection:


The first sketch in this group is of "Alexa Wilding" (1873), one of Rossetti's favourite models in later years, her refined features well suited to the classic subjects that interested him.

Secondly, "Bocca Baciata" (1859), meaning "the kissed mouth", is inspired by the fourteenth century poet Giovanni Boccacio, who Rossetti quoted on the back of the painting, “The mouth that has been kissed loses not its freshness; still it renews itself even as does the moon." This painting was modeled by Fanny Cornworth, another of Rossetti's lovers.

Last in this group is a pair of "Beata Beatrix" (Blessed Beatrice) paintings. The first, completed in 1870, was also adapted to Pets Badger format, here. The second, from 1882, the last year of Rossetti's life, has a more muted and ethereal aspect. These two works commemorate the last moment of Beatrice Portinari's life, the idealized woman who externalized Dante Alighieri's muse. But equally they memorialized the subject, Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti's beloved wife, who died young and, in parallel with Dante, expressed Rossetti's muse.

An alternate Lady on Red version of "Beata Beatrix" (1870) is available here.


First in this group, "The Boat of Love" (1874), is executed in hazily muted, almost monochromatic tones.

Secondly, Jane Morris appears as Shakespeare's "Desdemona", drawn in chalk, a favourite and very effective medium for Rossetti.

Next, Jane appears again, this time as "La Donna della Finestra" (1879) or "The Lady of the Window". This work recalls a scene from Dante Alighieri's autobiographic poem La Vita Nuova in which a woman gazes compassionately at the poet, in instinctual sympathy for the loss of his Beatrice. Rossetti again saw a parallel here with his own life after the death of Elizabeth Siddal, and Jane Morris herself played the role of the lady in the window in reality.

The last in this group, "Il Ramoscello" (1865) meaning "The Twig", is probably a portrait of a young woman called Amy Graham.


The first in this series of three, "Jane Burden, Aged 18" (1858), is a distinctive sketch of Jane in the year before she married William Morris.

In the middle, "La Bella Mano" (1874) focuses on "The Beautiful Hand" of Alexa Wilding, overseen by Jane and William's daughter May Morris as the angel. This work was designed to illustrate a collection of sonnets by Giusto de' Conti that share the same title.

Lastly, a half-length sketch of "Elizabeth Siddal" from the 1860s concludes the collection as uploaded here. But actually this project was designed as a series of sixteen works rather than eleven, and the remainder can be found here: Five Dante Gabriel Rossetti Nudes, Lady on Red Recolours.


Due to the surprising popularity of the Rossetti Suspense grey-scale conversions, I have also uploaded a selection of this collection in monochrome, as shown above.

These images are all in the public domain, and sourced from either The Athenaeum, the Art Renewal Center or the Walker Art Gallery. Each was reduced in size from the originals without dimensional distortion, and with matting used to fill out the aspect ratio where necessary. As usual, I used SimPE to set reflectivity to zero so as to maximize clarity. You may include these recolours in any uploaded lots, whether for free or pay - but it would be nice if you included a credit in the description and sent me a PM. I would prefer that you not upload these files elsewhere, if only because such duplication can cause confusion.


Additional Credits:

SimPE 6.0, the primary tool!
Corel WEB.PhotoPaint, for picture frame manipulation and texturing
Microsoft Photo Editor, for adjusting contrast, brightness and size
Senesi2003's tiny ceiling light is great for the unobtrusive illumination of the sample pictures
Attribute Change 5.30 is very useful for adjusting a file's date and timestamp, used to put the recolours together in consecutive order, with the most recent recolour being the one furthest to the left. Thus the paintings are arranged in alphabetical order within the catalogue popup display from right to left.