As excuses for getting out of tricky work meetings go, having “constant diarrhoea” usually works a treat – and so it proved for the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti in a letter written 155 years ago.
Now, this little-known letter, in which Rossetti tries to put off a difficult meeting with an exasperated patron by claiming to have diarrhoea “and other troublesome symptoms”, is to go on display for the first time on Tuesday.
It will be exhibited alongside the celebrated painting that Rossetti kept promising his longsuffering backer, George Rae, that he would finish.
An infamous womaniser and depressive insomniac who became a heavy drinker, Rossetti repeatedly made excuses in his letters to Rae, a Liverpudlian banker, about why the paintings Rae had bought weren’t ready on time.
“We have this idea of the Victorians as being very reticent and not talking about their bodily issues – but they are actually fairly graphic,” said Melissa Gustin, curator of the exhibit.
In the letter, written in August 1868 and normally held in the Walker Art Gallery archives by National Museums Liverpool, Rossetti details how a prolonged bout of diarrhoea prevented him from meeting Rae in Liverpool: “I have had a constant diarrhoea and other troublesome symptoms since coming to Speke [Hall]; nevertheless, as I found I should not see you here today, I started off this morning with Mr Leyland for Liverpool, but when about getting into the trap felt so giddy and unwell that I was obliged to return to the house – the fact is that I have been fagging myself out for some time.”
Gustin said Rossetti’s diarrhoea disclosure, although likely to be true, was just one of a “cycle” of various excuses made by the artist, who died in 1882 at the age of 53 after suffering from alcohol psychosis and a prescription drug addiction. “Rossetti’s reputation may lose him the benefit of the doubt that it is a tummy bug, rather than the consequences of his own actions,” she said. “There is a possibility that he might just be hungover.”
The letter refers to Rossetti’s then unfinished painting, Sibylla Palmifera, which will go on display alongside the letter at the Lady Lever art gallery in Port Sunlight, Wirral, on Tuesday.
Rossetti first wrote to Rae, an avid pre-Raphaelite collector, about Sibylla Palmifera when he began the painting nearly three years earlier, in December 1865. He cannily took a £300 deposit from his wealthy patron – the equivalent of about £30,000 today – after Rae confided in January 1866 he was “not able to resist the temptation” to buy Sibylla Palmifera, a work that hints at the temporary nature of love and female beauty.
A year later, Rossetti promised Rae he would make progress on the painting “before long”. Six months after that, he was “vexed” that “somehow” he has not done so: his “only excuse” is that he has worked on no other substantial painting.
Twelve months later, in late July 1868, a frame for the painting – and a bill for the frame – was sent to Rae’s home, but not the painting itself, triggering the frustrated financier to write to Rossetti: “Will you kindly explain? Any progress on ‘Palmifera’ since we saw her last?”
Rossetti then wrote back with the letter blaming his bowels. He would take a further two years to complete the painting.
It is typical of Rossetti, who was “quite a hypochondriac”, to be very candid about his health with his friends, said Dr Deborah Lam, English lecturer at the University of Bristol.
Soon after the letter, on the recommendation of one such friend, Rossetti became one of the first people in Britain to be prescribed chloral, an addictive sedative that he took with whisky for his insomnia. “His desire to constantly address what he saw as his health problems made him susceptible to quite new prescription drugs that were slightly dodgy,” said Lam.
As the artist’s health problems worsened, Rae continued to wait impatiently for Sibylla Palmifera. Then 153 years ago, on 16 December 1870, he wrote to Rossetti: “After the many, many Christmases we have looked forward to this supreme delight, could you not in the intervals of your greater work finish her merely as a relaxation?”
Three days later, when a letter arrived from Rossetti revealing the painting is complete, it sent Rae into “transports of joy”.
In 1882, paralysed and psychotic due to his addiction to whisky and chloral, Rossetti died. He was buried in All Saints churchyard in Birchington-on-Sea, Kent.
