Christina Rossetti "In an Artist's Studio" - Poem, animation

Heres a virtual movie of the great Christina Rossetti reading her exquisite poem"in an artists studio" Written in 1856 and published for the first time posthumously in 1896.



In her poem, "In an Artist's studio," Christina Rossetti responds to the tendency of Victorian poets to objectify women in their experiment with aestheticism. Her poem recalls Robert Browning's "Andrea del Sarto" in which a male artist pretends to possess his estranged wife by having her pose as his model. This poem also recalls Pygmalian of Ovid's Metamorphoses, a misogynist sculptor who chisels the perfect female and becomes so enamored with his own creation that he asks the gods to bring her to life. Like the artist of Rossetti's poem, Pygmalian essentially falls in love with himself and his own projections and ideas about women. In Rossetti's poem, the artist conceives of his female subject as a passive, emotionless object which he can mold to fit his own fantasies and projections. The description of the female subject is consistent with the stereotypical Victorian view of female patience, passivity and selflessness. The image of the artist "feeding" upon his subject's face refers to the male desire to possess women as wholly aesthetic objects.

Christina Georgina Rossetti (5 December 1830 29 December 1894) was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. She is best known for her long poem Goblin Market, her love poem "Remember", and for the words of what became the popular Christmas carol "In the Bleak Midwinter".

Rossetti was born in London and educated at home by her mother. Her siblings were the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, and Maria Francesca Rossetti. Their father, Gabriele Rossetti, was an Italian poet and a political asylum seeker from Naples; their mother, Frances Polidori, was the sister of Lord Byron's friend and physician, John William Polidori, author of The Vampyre.

Kind Regards

Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2010

Poem

One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
A saint, an angel — every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more or less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

Christina Rossetti