LETTER VIII.

TO JOHN TUPPER.

I cannot now say what Mr. Tupper’s “pet theory” may have been; apparently (from some law of optics) that the real tint of foliage is green, even when the eye sees it of some different colour. The subject of my brother’s picture was to be _The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in the Garden of Eden_: but the landscape background which he now painted was finished up years afterwards for a subject of quite another kind, named _The Bower-meadow_.

High Street, Sevenoaks. Friday evening [October 1850.]

Dear Jack,

Before ever I saw your note to Hunt of this morning, you had already been forcibly recalled to my mind, on arriving here, by the desire that I should be endowed with the privileges that would result from a pet theory of yours. The fact is, between you and me, that the leaves on the trees I have to paint here appear red, yellow, &c., to my eyes; and, as of course I know them on that account to be really of a vivid green, it seems rather annoying that I cannot do them so; my subject shrieking aloud for Spring.

I will not tell you my subject, as I wish to show you the design on my return, having it here at present. I have not seen you for an age, though I marked you among the four or five to be routed out before I left town--after which I was forced at last to bolt o’ the sudden, with my tail between my legs, whereby hang particulars of acute anguish. My canvas is a whopper again, more than seven feet long. Ai! Ai!

Hunt gets on swimmingly--yesterday, indeed, a full inch over the ankles: I myself had to sketch under the canopy of heaven, without a hat, and with my umbrella tied over my head to my buttonhole--a position which, will you oblige me by remembering, I expressly desired should be selected for my statue--(N.B. Trousers turned up). This last item is chiefly to suit Woolner’s ideas of sculpture, should he get the commission. Stephens, being under a course of philosophy, paints in the house. His band is still, however, an inch or so short of Epicurus’s. To-day I began painting on my picture in the Park; and began to profit by the views of the public thereon. One man told another that I was drawing a map, and analysed my outline to that end. One boy was kicked by another for insulting me by doubting that my landscape was meant for a deer. I saw the back of a pair of top boots, and a cut-away coat; Lord Amherst, I was told, was sneaking inside, but he refrained from exposing either his person or his ideas on Art. His house is visited with artists in Egyptian swarms, poor wretch! Hunt remarked--how disagreeable to enter one of your rooms for the purpose of delivering a soliloquy, and find a man there behind an easel; which was bobbish for Hunt.

The cold here is awful when it does not rain, and then the rain is awful. “And what shall guard me but my naked love?”--and a railway rug....

Believe me, dear Jack, Your sincere friend, D. G. ROSSETTI.