Portrait of Mrs. William J. Stillman 1869

Curator: Standing before us, we have Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Portrait of Mrs. William J. Stillman," a pencil drawing from 1869, currently held in a Private Collection. What are your immediate thoughts? Editor: Ethereal, isn’t she? Almost dreamlike. The soft, hazy lines lend a gentle melancholy to the whole piece. Like she’s a beautiful thought fading at the edges. Curator: Interesting, the Pre-Raphaelites were so captivated with their subjects and how to produce a feeling. Consider the materials - the delicate shading achieved with pencil allows for a remarkable level of detail and control, but simultaneously this sort of hazy composition and execution would perhaps have been less popular in portraiture, or ‘high’ art at this moment in history. How does it change our perception of what portraiture can be, by making it look soft and yielding in the execution? Editor: It certainly removes it from the realm of stark representation. It feels like an act of worship, frankly. Look at the gentle rendering of her hair – almost reverent. One might easily argue this moves far beyond mere portraiture and seeks to depict the essence of womanhood, or at least, Rossetti's romanticized version of it. There is a quality that exceeds a straightforward representational depiction. Curator: Precisely. And we can also think about the labor involved in creating such delicate detail, a skilled process in which there is a market value to that hand-crafted work. As an exercise that challenges the relationship between artist and muse. He obviously elevates Mrs. Stillman. It’s also an image rooted in material culture of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that continues to this day, so while he’s romanticizing his image of the subject, that same image of the era is carried on into contemporary image production. Editor: Absolutely. The whole image drips with Pre-Raphaelite longing. It pulls me in…makes me wonder about her story and that dreamy quality they imbued in their artwork that persists over a hundred years later. I get lost imagining myself as the subject here. Curator: I find that very relatable, and in that sense you hit on the social function and enduring qualities of the artwork through materials, labor and our contemporary market. It gives us much to consider.