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This powerful, over-life-sized head study was made in 1857 in preparation for the mural ‘Sir Launcelot’s Vision of the Sanc Grael’ for the Oxford Union Debating Hall.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti is one of British art history’s most recognisable names. A founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood alongside William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, Rossetti sought to strip away what he considered the hollow conventions of post-Raphael academic painting in favour of intensity, sincerity and literary seriousness. By 1857, at the age of twenty-nine, Rossetti had become the movement’s de facto leader and its bridge to a new circle of admirers, chief among them William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.
It was in that same summer that the present work was undertaken. Rossetti, having been shown around the newly completed Oxford Union debating hall by its architect, Benjamin Woodward, proposed filling its blank upper bays with scenes from Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, a text that had captivated him and the younger...
This powerful, over-life-sized head study was made in 1857 in preparation for the mural ‘Sir Launcelot’s Vision of the Sanc Grael’ for the Oxford Union Debating Hall.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti is one of British art history’s most recognisable names. A founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood alongside William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, Rossetti sought to strip away what he considered the hollow conventions of post-Raphael academic painting in favour of intensity, sincerity and literary seriousness. By 1857, at the age of twenty-nine, Rossetti had become the movement’s de facto leader and its bridge to a new circle of admirers, chief among them William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.
It was in that same summer that the present work was undertaken. Rossetti, having been shown around the newly completed Oxford Union debating hall by its architect, Benjamin Woodward, proposed filling its blank upper bays with scenes from Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, a text that had captivated him and the younger members of the group in equal measure. Seven artists, Rossetti, Morris, Burne-Jones, Arthur Hughes, Valentine Cameron Prinsep, Spencer Stanhope and John Hungerford Pollen, spent the summer painting directly onto the walls, each taking a separate episode from the Arthurian legend. The scheme became one of the defining episodes of Pre-Raphaelite history, seeing the birth of the second movement of the Brotherhood and was mostly remembered for ‘the fun and camaraderie’ where these artists worked side by side on a single scheme for the first and only time.[1] However, painted in distemper straight onto the walls, the murals have drastically changed and faded with time. Thus, the present drawing offers a rare, vivid record of how richly conceived Rossetti’s contribution originally was.
This drawing is a study for the head of Sir Launcelot asleep before the shrine of the Sanc Grael, barred by his unconfessed love for Guenevere from the vision granted to purer knights. The sketch speaks to the camaraderie of the group, whose members sat for each other when models were needed. [2] Val Prinsep posed for the sleeping Launcelot, giving the mythic figure the face of a friend in the truth-to-nature manner the Brotherhood favoured throughout their work. The surrounding paper is flecked with paint, physical evidence that the sheet was used as a working cartoon on site as the mural took shape, lending it a robustness and immediacy quite distinct from a more considered studio drawing.
Passed down through Rossetti’s brother, William Michael, and his wife, Lucy Madox Rossetti, it remained unidentified for over a century, viewed the wrong way up with the head facing upward. Only in 2000 when it was rotated ahead of its sale was it recognised as the missing study for the sleeping Launcelot.
[1] Tim Barringer, (1999) Reading the Pre-Raphaelites. United States, 48.
[2] Dennis T. Lanigan, (2021) ‘The Decoration of the Oxford Union Debating Hall’, The Victorian Web literature, history & culture in the age of Victoria. Available at: https://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/art/architecture/oxford/misc/lanigan.html (Accessed 16 September 2026).
