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Rossetti and His Circle
Background information accompanies caricatures of Rosetti, Swinburne, Browning, Tennyson, Wilde, Whistler, Ruskin, and Millais
- GenresArt
79 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 1972
About the author
Max Beerbohm
311 books95 followersSir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm, as "Max," known British writ, apparently wrote
Caricatures of Twenty-five Gentlemen
in 1896.
Henry Maximilian Beerbohm served as an English essayist, parodist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Bee...
Henry Maximilian Beerbohm served as an English essayist, parodist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Bee...
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 16, 2015
Now that the Internet and chronic solvent abuse have cruelly abridged my attention span, I can’t seem to concentrate on anything more demanding than a businesslike text message (“Where u at bro?”) I’ve come to accept that I’ll never read Sein und Zeit in German – or any other earthly language. I’ll probably never read another novel. I might not read this paragraph.
Which is why Rossetti and His Circle is perfect for me. It’s short, beautiful and practically wordless. It’s also amusing. How come nothing’s amusing anymore? The term itself has a slightly archaic ring, like ‘gallant’ or ‘chaste’. I don’t think anyone’s even tried to be amusing since Dick Cavett went off the air. I watch something like the trailer for the new Mad Max movie and think, ‘Yes, yes, clearly awesome. But where’s the witty insouciance?’ Then again, old George Miller didn’t exactly set out to remake His Girl Friday, did he? So I don’t know what I’m complaining about.
Rossetti and His Circle was first published in 1922. Although it could now almost pass for an avant-garde graphic novel, it must have struck its original audience as bizarrely quaint. In an England that was already reading Joyce and dancing to jazz, here was this dandified aesthete composing a series of cartoons about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an extinct bohemia as remote from Beerbohm’s contemporaries as the beatniks are from us. But instead of doing what most modern graphic novelists would do when presenting some dimly remembered historical period—i.e. dumbing it down—Beerbohm assumes, on the reader’s part, an impossibly granular knowledge of mid-Victorian culture. This, for instance, is a picture called ‘Blue China’:
Thanks to an editor’s note, I can tell you that the dignified old gentleman here represents Thomas Carlyle and the little guy Whistler, while the vases point back to an old quarrel between the Aesthetes and the Ruskinites. So, yeah, if you happen to be an art historian, this scene might be unspeakably hilarious. Otherwise, though, not so much. And yet it still works somehow: you sense a moral seriousness behind the levity, even if the satire is partially occluded. It may be an inside joke, but the delivery is so perfect that you take the brilliance of the punchline on faith.
Not that it really matters, but I’ve never had the slightest interest in Pre-Raphaelite art. All those ethereal maidens drowning in rivers and whatnot appeal to the same vague romanticism that helped install Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’ in a million dorm rooms (right next to the obligatory Robert Doisneau photo). But Beerbohm, a man saturated with irony, manages to make these disreputable painters both interesting and sympathetic. He even gets at the strange nobility of the titular Rossetti, turning that BBW-loving slacker into some kind of hero, a proto-Lebowski – mute, impassive, often recumbent, but still abiding:
Believe it or not, that picture contains, among other virtues, a sly allusion to S&M. I won’t spoil it for you, though. Just read the book, preferably in a high-quality edition with intelligent endnotes.
Which is why Rossetti and His Circle is perfect for me. It’s short, beautiful and practically wordless. It’s also amusing. How come nothing’s amusing anymore? The term itself has a slightly archaic ring, like ‘gallant’ or ‘chaste’. I don’t think anyone’s even tried to be amusing since Dick Cavett went off the air. I watch something like the trailer for the new Mad Max movie and think, ‘Yes, yes, clearly awesome. But where’s the witty insouciance?’ Then again, old George Miller didn’t exactly set out to remake His Girl Friday, did he? So I don’t know what I’m complaining about.
Rossetti and His Circle was first published in 1922. Although it could now almost pass for an avant-garde graphic novel, it must have struck its original audience as bizarrely quaint. In an England that was already reading Joyce and dancing to jazz, here was this dandified aesthete composing a series of cartoons about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an extinct bohemia as remote from Beerbohm’s contemporaries as the beatniks are from us. But instead of doing what most modern graphic novelists would do when presenting some dimly remembered historical period—i.e. dumbing it down—Beerbohm assumes, on the reader’s part, an impossibly granular knowledge of mid-Victorian culture. This, for instance, is a picture called ‘Blue China’:
Thanks to an editor’s note, I can tell you that the dignified old gentleman here represents Thomas Carlyle and the little guy Whistler, while the vases point back to an old quarrel between the Aesthetes and the Ruskinites. So, yeah, if you happen to be an art historian, this scene might be unspeakably hilarious. Otherwise, though, not so much. And yet it still works somehow: you sense a moral seriousness behind the levity, even if the satire is partially occluded. It may be an inside joke, but the delivery is so perfect that you take the brilliance of the punchline on faith.
Not that it really matters, but I’ve never had the slightest interest in Pre-Raphaelite art. All those ethereal maidens drowning in rivers and whatnot appeal to the same vague romanticism that helped install Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’ in a million dorm rooms (right next to the obligatory Robert Doisneau photo). But Beerbohm, a man saturated with irony, manages to make these disreputable painters both interesting and sympathetic. He even gets at the strange nobility of the titular Rossetti, turning that BBW-loving slacker into some kind of hero, a proto-Lebowski – mute, impassive, often recumbent, but still abiding:
Believe it or not, that picture contains, among other virtues, a sly allusion to S&M. I won’t spoil it for you, though. Just read the book, preferably in a high-quality edition with intelligent endnotes.
December 16, 2018
This, more than anything, makes me want to acquire a volume of Dante Rossetti's beautiful paintings and illustrations.
It's hard to rate Max Beerbohm's thin volume of 23+bonus caricature scene plates with its slight author introduction and a much longer pre-introduction by a later editor that comprises most of this book's pages. Beerbohm was a dry humorist which comes out in his little captions and in the colored caricature portraits he drew of the artist Rossetti and the circle of bohemians and VIPs who frequented the artist's London digs in the mid-to-late 1800s. The emphasis in the scenes is on barely detectable gulfs in communication or in the silliness of stiff social interactions that almost seem like nearly imperceptible faux pas. Rossetti himself almost comes off as apathetic and indifferent in these situations, an observer of the drawing-room social calls ostensibly directed to him.
Beerbohm was an enthusiast of the Victorian period and its heroes, and his favorites were Byron, Disraeli and Rossetti, none of whom he'd ever met. Beerbohm was only 10 when Rossetti died, and he derived his images from the photos and drawings of others, with most of the rest cobbled from his imagination. He seems to have had a particular interest in the wild poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne, who appears in several of the plates, always eager to render soliloquies of his own poetry to anyone within earshot -- those willing or otherwise.
The page-count of this Yale Press edition is actually 100+ pp. but Goodreads simply has it at 49, so I get gypped a bit there in terms of accomplishment. (I now learned that gypped is a racist term, or possibly so. No harm to gypsies intended.)
I'm going to be selling this volume on Ebay for a tidy profit, and am glad to at least have had it in my possession for perusal for a short while.
-e/k 2018
It's hard to rate Max Beerbohm's thin volume of 23+bonus caricature scene plates with its slight author introduction and a much longer pre-introduction by a later editor that comprises most of this book's pages. Beerbohm was a dry humorist which comes out in his little captions and in the colored caricature portraits he drew of the artist Rossetti and the circle of bohemians and VIPs who frequented the artist's London digs in the mid-to-late 1800s. The emphasis in the scenes is on barely detectable gulfs in communication or in the silliness of stiff social interactions that almost seem like nearly imperceptible faux pas. Rossetti himself almost comes off as apathetic and indifferent in these situations, an observer of the drawing-room social calls ostensibly directed to him.
Beerbohm was an enthusiast of the Victorian period and its heroes, and his favorites were Byron, Disraeli and Rossetti, none of whom he'd ever met. Beerbohm was only 10 when Rossetti died, and he derived his images from the photos and drawings of others, with most of the rest cobbled from his imagination. He seems to have had a particular interest in the wild poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne, who appears in several of the plates, always eager to render soliloquies of his own poetry to anyone within earshot -- those willing or otherwise.
The page-count of this Yale Press edition is actually 100+ pp. but Goodreads simply has it at 49, so I get gypped a bit there in terms of accomplishment. (I now learned that gypped is a racist term, or possibly so. No harm to gypsies intended.)
I'm going to be selling this volume on Ebay for a tidy profit, and am glad to at least have had it in my possession for perusal for a short while.
-e/k 2018
February 24, 2017
Some of the drawings are absolutely laugh-aloud hilarious, at least for those interested in these artists and writers.
October 2, 2017
Highly entertaining, deftly color-washed caricatures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his circle ... dying when Beerbohm was around 10, Rossetti was a gifted poet, artist, and bohemian ... the erudite introduction by N. John Hall explains how Beerbohm was captivated by this prior generation, some of whom he interviewed in their old age ... a window on a vanished world, with tongue firmly in cheek ...
October 31, 2011
As near as perfect as a can be
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews