Previously Unseen Dante Gabriel Rossetti Portrait Goes on View for the First Time

• A newly acquired portrait by Dante Gabriel Rossetti of his sister Christina Rossetti anchors a Wightwick Manor exhibition.
• The 1877 drawing reflects shared grief after their sister Maria’s death and Dante’s struggle with depression.
• The show explores Rossetti family collaborations and highlights artists Elizabeth Siddal and Lucy Madox Brown.

A never-before-exhibited portrait of the poet Christina Rossetti by her painter brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is the centerpiece of a show exploring one of Victorian Britain’s most influential families.

Unlike Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite paintings of winsome maidens surrounded by flowers, the 1877 chalk portrait of his sister offers a flat, realistic impression. She wears an impenetrable expression and dull-colored clothing that blends into an unadorned background. The somber tone is the product of family tragedy: Christina remains in mourning following the death of her older sister Maria, a writer and Anglican nun, in 1876.

Created on the north Kent coast, where the painter had decamped to escape depression and the pressures of London, it is, in effect, a tribute to Maria and an acknowledgement of the grief that Christina and Dante share—Christina, by contrast, expressed her feelings in the poem As his younger brother William would write a decade later, the portrait had a positive effect: “The experiment turned out a complete success. [Dante] perceived at once that nothing but an effort of will was needed to enable him to continue working at his art.”

The portrait, one of only two solo portraits he created of his sister in later life, was recently acquired by the National Trust and forms part of “The Rossettis – Siblings and Spouses,” an exhibition at Wightwick Manor in Wolverhampton, a city in the English Midlands. Wightwick Manor was bestowed to the National Trust in 1937 by Rosalie and Geoffrey Mander, whose devotion to collecting Victorian art has made the property a significant place to see Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts work.

“We wanted to explore how the family dynamics, influences and inspirations, and collaboration between family members inspired their art,” the curators Helen Bratt-Wyton and Hannah Squire said over email. “We also wanted to explore why we have this internationally significant collection.”

Born to politically radical Italian exiles living in London, the four Rossetti children would help shape Victorian tastes in art, poetry, and literary criticism throughout the 19th century. Christina endures as one of the era’s most important poets and Dante co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848.

Along with the previously unseen portrait, the exhibition includes rarely seen drawings and lithographs Dante made as a teenager, including a set of satirical playing cards of political figures such as the Duke of Wellington and Prince Albert. “The Rossettis” also displays numerous objects from the artist’s home in Chelsea, southwest London, from books and ceramics to a death mask of Napoleon Bonaparte.

As suggested by the exhibition’s title, Wightwick also brings forward the work of Elizabeth Siddal and Lucy Madox Brown, Pre-Raphaelite-associated models and artists who married Dante and William respectively. They are, Bratt-Wyton and Squires noted, “talented artists in their own right.”

Twelve works by Siddal, who was the model for John Everett Millais’s movement defining Ophelia (1851), are on display, including in which a woman reaches out for a through the trees for a ghostly double of herself. The show also presents books written by all four Rossetti siblings, the Pre-Raphaelite magazine , and biographical works by William Rossetti.