titleleaf:velvet-jellyfish:artist-rossetti:Image of women and an exotic pet, 1869, Dante Gabriel Ros
titleleaf:velvet-jellyfish:artist-rossetti:Image of women and an exotic pet, 1869, Dante Gabriel RossettiMedium: penhttps://www.wikiart.org/en/dante-gabriel-rossetti/image-of-women-and-an-exotic-pet-1869I love how he clearly has no idea what that animal is, he just drew itRossetti was really into wombats! That’s what the creature in this sketch looks like to me – every time I see one in art or in photos I think of his goofy devotion to the animals. I’d wager the name of this sketch was given by somebody slightly less familiar with wombats. He drew lots of chunky little wombats even in projects where they had fuck-all to do with the subject matter.From “Rossetti’s Wombat: A Pre-Raphaelite Obsession in Victorian England” by Harold White Fellow: In September 1869, Dante Gabriel Rossetti bought the first of two pet wombats. This was the culmination of well over 12 years of enthusiasm for the exotic marsupial. If not from Thomas Woolner, whose view of the Australian landscape was pretty bleak, Rossetti and his friends may well have derived their particular enthusiasm for wombats from Gould’s or some other appealing description. Or maybe they simply fell in love with the wombats at the Regent’s Park Zoo. In the 1860s, Rossetti often took his friends to visit the wombats at the zoo, sometimes for hours on end. On one occasion Rossetti wrote to Ford Madox Brown: ‘Dear Brown: Lizzie and I propose to meet Georgie and Ned [the Burne-Jones] at 2 pm tomorrow at the Zoological Gardens—place of meeting, the Wombat’s Lair.’ In this period a number of new wombats arrived at the Regent’s Park Zoo: a rare, hairy-nosed wombat on 24 July 1862, and two common wombats despatched from the Melbourne Zoo on 18 March 1863. As well, Rossetti made regular visits with his brother, William Michael, to the Acclimatisation Society in London and its counterpart in Paris, to keep an eye on the hairy-nosed wombats residing in both places. This was no passing fancy. Rossetti’s Wombat Curled up on his Master’s Lap (1871) by W B Scott. (Though the blogger at The Kissed Mouth remarks that this looks more like a woodchuck; it sounds like it may have been drawn from memory and not from life.)Wow @titleleaf this is the best response I could have gotten to posting that. I am DELIGHTED! -- source link