The Beginning of drawing Prostitutes
Rossetti's writes the monologue poem Jenny to talk about his thought of prostitute through a man who is Jenny's customer. In this poem, Rossetti portraits Jenny as a woman with grace even though for men she is just a tool to satisfy their desire (p.3). For Rossetti, lost women like Jenny are fragile and lonely since they are discriminated by other women. They are like “the volume seldom read”(p.5) and “rose shut in a book; in which pure women may not look”(p.7),which suggests that their beauty is inaccessible to the groups who obeys the Victorian tradition and only people who wants to break such tradition, like Rossetti himself, can appreciate their beauty and be sympathetic of their life (Keefe). He also parallels Jenny with Nell, the cousin of Jenny's customer that he is “proudest of ”and discovers that there is no difference between Jenny and Nell, no difference between whole and “normal” woman (Payne).
His thinking about prostitution can be demonstrates in Found, an oil painting that makes him becomes the very first artists to draw prostitution. In this painting, Rossetti depicts a young fallen woman caught by her former lover who carries a lamb from countryside to the market in London (Morgan). This event happens in such a remote place because prostitution is not accepted by the mainstream in Victorian British. Unlike Manet's Olympia, she dresses in normal manner and her entire body is covered by cloth, which makes her less directly related to sexual activity although her brilliantly red hair and pale skin implies her status as a whole (Mariotti). She looks extremely sad and guilty when caught and the lamb in the cart kind of suggests that she is innocent in heart (Mariotti). These two together demonstrates her unwillingness of being a prostitute.
Such treatment of prostitute reminds me of the controversial South Korean artist Shin Yun-Bok, who starts his career as a Joseon court painter but gains fame for his paintings of daily life and prostitutes and people think that he shifts his artistic focus due to his disappointment of the ruling class. Like Rossetti, Shin Yun-Bok lives in a period in which prostitutes are not considered as appropriate for painting and their social status is low. In Portrait of a Beauty, he paints a young prostitute who stands alone in the black background, which makes her isolated from where she lives. Also, Shin paints the young prostitute dressing in the usual manner of the period in which she lives and thus vagues her connection with sexual activities, like what Rossetti does in Found. What differentiates her from prostitutes depicted in paintings of the same time is the sadness on her face. Women who engage in sexual activities with men are often captured by their happiness when they spend their time with customers. However, this women stares at far away sadly and plays with the decoration on her cloth, which probably can be interpreted that she does not want to live as a prostitute.
Even though these two paintings come from different cultural background, they do demonstrate the similarity of how prostitutes are treated when such a disputable subject first appears in conservative culture. Artists tend to avoid nudity that makes people connect the women they paint directly to sexual exchange while focus on their sadness of becoming something that other people despise. And these approach is quite distinctive from French Impressionism artist Manet, whose Olympia is a nude prostitute and does not feel shame of her occupation.
Reference
Marroit, M (2004). Rossetti's Found: Unfamiliar Territory. English and History of Art. Retrieved from http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/dgr/paintings/mariotti4.html
Morgan,H. Found by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1859). Retrieved from http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/dgr/paintings/11.html
Payne, J(1998). Two Literary Treatments of Prostitution in mid-19 century England: Rossetti's “Jenny” and Gaskell's “Esther”. Retrieved from http://www.oocities.org/athens/aegean/7023/prostitution.html
Rossetti, G.D. Jenny (1870).
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Found
Shin Yun-Bok, Portrait of a Beauty, South Korea, late 18th century.
Edouard
Manet, Olympia
I love the fact that you tied this to another artist. I believe that the portrayal of lower class subjects started the idea of questioning what should be considered art. Your discussions of the two artists remind me of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917), as it worked to push the boundaries of what should be considered "fine art." Similarly, I believe that Rossetti and Yun-Bok's works of prostitutes was an early form of the challenge of what can be considered as art.
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