Morning Music

Morning Music (1867) at Birmingham Museums Trust belongs to the group of close-up, half-length figures that Rossetti developed as his primary format from the late 1850s onward. The subject of a woman engaged with music — playing, listening, or singing — allowed him to combine his interest in the female figure, decorative textile and hair, and the synaesthetic associations between visual beauty and sound. The 1860s were Rossetti's most productive decade, when he created the paradigmatic images of Aesthetic Movement feminine beauty that would define his reputation. Jane Morris, Alexa Wilding, and Fanny Cornforth were his main models during this period, each lending a distinctive physical type to his idealized beauties. Music as subject matter connected to the broader Aesthetic Movement interest in art and music as parallel sensory experiences — Walter Pater's famous formulation that all art aspires to the condition of music was the theoretical articulation of a tendency Rossetti's painting embodied.

The close-up half-length format focuses all pictorial energy on the face, hair, hands, and upper body. Rich textile patterns on clothing serve as a visual foil to the figure's flesh tones and the warm auburn of Rossetti's favored hair type.