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Overview
Immortalized in the sensuous paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and widely imitated by fashionable women, Jane Morris (1839-1914) was, nonetheless, not your typical Victorian beauty. Her unruly dark hair, dense brows, tall and angular figure, and taste for loose, unadorned garments stood out in an age that favored fair-haired women of small stature, with feminine curves exaggerated by corsets and crinolines. Drawing on dozens of lavish portraits and rare photographs, author Debra Mancoff examines Jane Morris's "strange beauty" within the context of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic ideals and Victorian standards of fashion. The chronological narrative traces Morris's rise from an eighteen-year-old working-class Oxford girl to a virtual "supermodel" for the Pre-Raphaelites, focusing in particular on her relationships with artist-designer William Morris, whom she married in 1859, and Rossetti, with whom she shared a lifelong romance. Part biography, part art history, and part cultural study, Jane Morris: The Pre-Raphaelite Model of Beauty is an intriguing, informed account of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the woman whose oft-painted image became an icon of romantic beauty. ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Debra N. Mancoff is the author of David Roberts: Travels in Egypt and the Holy Land (Pomegranate, 1999); Burne-Jones (Pomegranate, 1998); The Return of King Arthur: The Legend through Victorian Eyes (Harry N. Abrams, 1995); and many other publications. She currently is a scholar-in-residence at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Book Details
Published
September 1, 2000
Publisher
San Francisco, Calif. : Pomegranate, c2000.
Pages
128
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780764913372