MAJOR WORKS OF THE YEAR

Literary: Consistent with his resolve to give up “poetry as a pursuit of my own” (55.58), DGR, as he moved into his Arthurian period (1856-57), virtually abandoned verse composition. A single original poem, his verse-letter “Valentine” to Lizzy appears in the letters of 1856, and only “The Woodspurge,” which was not published until Poems (1870), is dated 1856 by WMR in Works. The three poems published in The Oxford & Cambridge Magazine - “The Burden of Nineveh” (August), “The Blessed Damozel” (November) and “The Staff and Scrip” (December) - are all revisions of poems commenced in the 1850s.

Artistic: 1856 is better characterized as a year of commissions than completions. DGR finally reworked The Passover in the Holy Family (S.78) to Ruskin's satisfaction; completed Dante's Dream (S.81), commissioned by Ellen Heaton, in time for a lecture exhibition, “somewhere” as Ruskin said; and finished Fra Pace (S.80), which he sold to Morris. Commissions, a few highly lucrative, were abundant: £400 for the Llandaff triptych; £30 each for illustrations for the Moxon Tennyson; for several Arthurian pictures from Morris; for Mary in the House of St. John (S.110) from Ellen Heaton; and from a new patron, Thomas Plint, 40 guineas for a (now lost) St. Cecilia (S.83R.1) and, according to FMBD (193), a whopping 400 guineas for an unidentified work. Those for the Moxten and for Morris were executed by 1857.

SUMMARY OF THE YEAR'S LETTERS

Arrangements for exhibiting Page's portrait of RB at the RA; William Page's portrait of RB; visit to Paris; EES's return and subsequent health; engravings for Willmott's English Poets of the Nineteenth Century; Dante exhibition lecture; WHH's return from Holy Land and plans for exhibiting his work; Oxford & Cambridge Magazine; meeting with EBJ & WM; commissions from EH; Oxford Museum; tracings of endangered Italian frescoes; pictures in the RA; Ruskin's use of Browning; Windus’ Burd Helen; exchange of pictures with CLP; EES’ Clerk Saunders; Plint's commissions; TW's Bacon; notice of FMB's pictures; publication of Dante translations; puffs FMB & his Liverpool prize; Moxten illustrations; possibility of going to Algiers; photographing of Moxten drawings; Aurora Leigh; WM's patronage; Red Lion Square; death of Thomas Seddon; nomination for Old Water Colour Society; Men of the Time.