Dante Gabriel Rossetti (British, 1828-1882)
Burd Alane
signed with monogram (lower left)
oil on canvas
30 x 33cm (11 13/16 x 13in).
Footnotes:
Provenance
Thomas Plint; his posthumous sale, Christie's, London, English Pictures and Drawings, formed by that distinguished Patron of Art, Thomas E. Plint, Esq., 7-8 March 1862, lot 267 (£68 5s. to 'Crofts').
Mr Crofts, of Manchester (acquired from the above sale).
Mr James Leathart (acquired from the above sale); his sale, Christie's, London, 19 June 1897, lot 46 (bought in).
Mrs Edward Rae; Colonel Leathart Rae; Mrs Leathart Rae.
Thence by descent to the present owner.

Exhibited
London, Burlington Fine Arts Club, Pictures, Drawings, Designs and Studies by the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1883, no. 25, lent by James Leathart.
London, Goupil Gallery, A Pre-Raphaelite Collection, June-July 1896, no. 8.
Manchester, 1911, no. 163, lent by Mrs Edward Rae.
London, Tate Gallery, Loan Exhibition of Works by Pre-Raphaelite Painters from Collections in Lancashire, 1913, no. 30.
Port Sunlight, Lady Lever Art Gallery, The Pre-Raphaelites – Their Friends and Followers, 1948, no. 178, lent by Colonel Leathart Rae.
Newcastle upon Tyne, Laing Art Gallery, Paintings from the Leathart Collection, 1968, no. 61, lent by Mrs Leathart Rae.

Literature
W. Sharp, Dante Gabriel Rossetti – A Record and a Study, London, 1882, p. 174, catalogue no. 84.
W. M. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti – His Family-Letters, London, 1895, two volumes, I, p. 213.
W. M. Rossetti, 'A Pre-Raphaelite Collection', Art Journal, 1896, pp. 129-34.
H. C. Marillier, Dante Gabriel Rossetti – An Illustrated Memorial of his Art and Life, second edition, London, 1901, p. 155, catalogue no. 139.
E. Radford, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1908 (plate xix). Burlington Magazine, 1970, figure 38 (showing Frederick Hollyer's photograph of the painting).
V. Surtees, Dante Gabriel Rossetti – The Paintings and Drawings – A Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford, 1971, two volumes (I no. 144, p. 85).

This painting has remained in the collections of successive generations descending from James Leathart, who himself acquired it in 1862 or shortly afterwards. It has not been exhibited in public since 1968, when it was shown in the Laing Art Gallery's exhibition of works from the Leathart collection. Virginia Surtees included it in her 1971 Rossetti catalogue, although with reservations about its authenticity. It has now reappeared and may be recognised as an important and valuable addition to the canon of known works by Rossetti.

Burd Alane shows the head and shoulders and hands of a young woman, her head slightly turned to the left, and who gazes into an unknown space. She rests her hands on a brick parapet and on either side are seen sprays of honeysuckle. This is a similar format to the artist's previous thematic figurative subject, Bocca Baciata – 'The Kissed Mouth' (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), which shows the model Fanny Cornforth, and here again the spectator is invited to look lingeringly at the woman and yet is metaphorically held at a distance by the motif of the foreground parapet and wall, and likewise meets no response on the part of the person represented.

Although treated without narrative references which might identify an intended literary source, it has been assumed that Rossetti had in mind the Child Ballad known either as 'Burd Ellen' or 'Child Waters', and in which the pregnant Ellen insists on accompanying her master Child Waters but is told that she must dress as his foot page and run beside him as he rides. After their return and the birth of her child, Child Waters cares for her and promises that they will marry. This was a subject that had been treated by the Liverpool artist William Lindsay Windus in his painting of 1856 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). In support of this identification is the distinctly masculine character of the figure's clothing. However, there may have been some more personal association in Rossetti's choice of subject. In Scots dialect the words 'burd alane' refer to a young woman who is alone or solitary, or to an only child. Rossetti began the painting shortly after his marriage to Elizabeth Siddal, and continued to work on it during the period of her pregnancy, which was sadly ended on 2 May 1861 when she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. It is possibly the case that in taking the subject Rossetti was thinking both of the child that he and Lizzie were looking forward to at the time of his working on the composition, and then subsequently of their shared loss. Lizzie herself died of laudanum poisoning on 11 February 1862.

The artist's first biographer, William Sharp, succinctly summarised the history of this work as he knew it: 'Early in the same year [1861], was finished the fine head in oil called Bard-Alane [sic.], which was originally in the collection of Mr Plint, and now belongs to Mr Leathart.' (Sharp, 1882, p. 174.) In fact, the present subject appears to have been begun in the late summer of 1860, for on 11 September of that year Rossetti informed his friend George Price Boyce: 'I am just finishing a head in the style of Bocca [Baciata] somewhat, but with honeysuckles instead of 'merrygoes' [marigolds].' (Fredeman, The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti – The Formative Years 1835-1862, Cambridge, 2002, p. 310.) The painting must have been well advanced, if not finished, by early October 1860, because on the 11th of that month Rossetti described it in detail to William Bell Scott, presumably in the hope that Scott would in turn recommend it to his friend, the art collector James Leathart. As Rossetti wrote to Scott: 'About my picture, I should still be glad of a customer and may safely say that he would get one of my very best pieces of painting. The picture is a female head and hands, with a good deal of costume & a great deal of honeysuckle, all done carefully from nature of course. Indeed I believe it is more solid and satisfactory than anything I have yet done, & [Ford Madox] Brown (the only friend almost who has been in town to see it) thinks so too. But for this same out-of-season-ness, I trust I should not have it still to offer. [...] I should be very glad if you can mention it (without the least awkwardness to yourself) to any possible purchaser, as soon as convenient. And many thanks beforehand.' (Fredeman, ibid., p. 319.)

The following year Burd Alane was one of a group of three works that Rossetti offered to the dealer Ernest Gambart, who was then representing the executors of Thomas Plint (who had died in on 1 January 1861), in settlement of a debt of 680 guineas – a sum which had accrued as a result of Plint's habit of offering advances on works in hand and Rossetti's inability to resist ready cash. The indications are that there was some further work needed on the painting so that it might be ready for inclusion in the sale of Plint's collection, which took place at Christie's on 7 and 8 March 1862. On that occasion Burd Alane was bought by a Manchester-based picture dealer named Crofts who in turn sold it to James Leathart. Thus, it joined one of the most distinguished of all collections of Pre-Raphaelite art, displayed in James and Maria Leathart's house, Brackendene, at Low Fell, Gateshead, and where it was seen in conjunction with a galaxy of other masterpieces by Rossetti himself but also by Millais, Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown and Burne-Jones. About thirty years later Burd Alane was offered for sale in the Goupil Gallery exhibition of the Leathart collection, in June and July 1896, on which occasion the artist's brother, William Michael Rossetti, in an article in the Art Journal, described it as 'a good example of his technique', and commented on the model represented, observing that this was a physiognomy not seen in any other work by Rossetti, and saying that this refuted the charge that 'there was only one face that he ever did paint' (presumably thinking of Jane Morris). (Art Journal, 1896, p, 132.)

At the time of the Goupil exhibition, the dealer and artist Charles Fairfax Murray wrote encouragingly to the American collector Samuel Bancroft Junior about works available for purchase, opening: 'I was pleased to see one of your well known envelopes this morning. I had begun to think you had bought all the Leathart pictures and didn't like to own up! I wish you could see 'Burd Alane'. Nobody has yet taken pity on her nor I think has the price been raised of that one!' Bancroft responded by asking Murray to find out whether he might 'get me the 'Burd Alane' at what you consider a fair price', but this then elicited a virulently critical account of the work and in which Murray chided Bancroft for 'hankering after that daub called 'Burd Alane',' saying also that he doubted its authenticity and claiming that the photographer Frederick Hollyer likewise refused to accept it as autograph. Clearly, Bancroft was not persuaded by Murray's diatribe against the work. Having by then received a proof of Hollyer's albumen type photograph, he judged it for himself: 'I can see the lack of Rossettian expression in the print, – but the fellow who 'faked' it got pretty well into the neck peculiarities!' (Murray's letter is quoted at length by V. Surtees, volume I, p. 85, while all the letters concerning the painting have been published as The Correspondence between Samuel Bancroft, Jr. and Charles Fairfax Murray 1892-1916, edited by Rowland Elzea, Delaware Art Museum Occasional Papers, No. 2, February 1980, pp. 108-14)). Murray's curious and abrupt change of heart about the painting may perhaps be explained by growing personal antipathy towards W. M. Rossetti in the 1890s, combined with a desire to assert his assumed authority over Bancroft in the matter of art purchases.

Notwithstanding any historic doubts about the painting's authenticity, it is in fact a most interesting work done at a time when the artist's innate skill in oil painting, exemplified in Bocca Baciata and then carried forward in his superb triptych The Seed of David, for Llandaff Cathedral, was emerging. In the early 1860s Rossetti was still learning how to handle colour tones and the use of black pigment, and how to control the influence of the ground colour. Most importantly, what he was discovering was that oil, rather than watercolour, lent itself to simpler and more dominant figure types and allowed greater contrast of tone. Burd Alane was treated with extraordinary intensity and with a complete sense of the individuality of the woman represented, and thus stands as a precursor of the series of thematic female subjects which was to be the great achievement of the later stages of the artist's career.

Burd Alane remains in its original frame, made in the style which James Leathart particularly favoured and consisting of an outer part formed of a projecting rail with bevelled sides and into which have been cut semi-circular scoops the flat part of which meets the edge of the two bevels. The scoops alternate from inner to outer side so that a rippling or wave pattern is achieved. The painting itself is secured by gilded oak boards and with the title lettered at the lower centre. Other works belonging to Leathart which had the same type of frame were the two portraits of himself and his wife Maria, by Ford Madox Brown and Rossetti respectively (private collection).

We are grateful to Christopher Newall for compiling this catalogue entry.
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