“Curiosity and the Desire of Beauty”: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Beloved and Some Contingent Aesthetic Considerations

Abstract

Using as a basis Walter Pater’s contention in the “Postscript” to Appreciations (1889) that “[c]uriosity and the desire of beauty, have each their place in art, as in all true art criticism,” this article offers an analysis of the inspiration, production, colorifics, iconography, and reception of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Beloved (1865–66, 1873), a residually Pre-Raphaelite painting that Frederic George Stephens regarded as one of “the finest productions of . . . [Rossetti’s] genius and matured skills.” Demonstrating through the comments of Stephens and others that Victorians responded erotically to The Beloved, the article draws on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment to assist in situating the painting and related works in the context of “art for art’s sake” and the emergence of modernist aesthetics. In doing so, the article also situates The Beloved among central issues of Victorian scholarly and theoretical debate such as race, materialism, and gendered viewing.