ABSTRACT
Of the poets discussed in this chapter, only Rossetti is known to have had more than the few German lessons that Swinburne had during his six weeks in Germany in 1855. Morris and Dowson had a reading knowledge of medieval and modern German respectively, which they owed to their own efforts. Rossetti and Dowson are both accredited translators from German. Faust also left its mark on Rossetti’s work in another way. One of the sketches he contributed to the early Pre-Raphaelite portfolio was Gretchen in the Chapel, and his oil painting of Lady Lilith was inspired by Goethe’s quatrain on Lilith from the Walpurgisnacht, as was the sonnet ‘Body’s Beauty’ in The House of Life. Pre-Raphaelite painting was relatively little known in Germany until 1891, when it was a feature of the International Exhibition in Berlin, reviewed by the art historian Cornelius Gurlitt in his book Die Kunst unserer Zeit auf der internationalen Kunstausstellung zu Berlin 1891.
