who is the boy? [8]

D G Rossetti, study of sleeping youth 1867 BMAG

One African boy about which some fragmentary information is known is the sleeping child Rossetti added to his watercolour versions of the Return of Tibullus to Delia in the 1860s.

He was  not, as has been supposed, the same lad who modelled for the Black child in Rossetti's Beloved of 1865.  But a ship's boy recruited from the Sailors' Home or hostel in London's docklands.  This was in same are as the the animal merchant Jamrach, from where Rossetti purchased his wombat and other creatures for his garden menagerie.

According to Harry Dunn, Rossetti's studio assistant, when DGR thought to introduce a house slave supposed to be guarding the threshold of Delia's Roman house, 'it was a puzzle where to find a regular little Nubian.'   [Nubian being the preferred Victorian term for 'Black African' when the Nword wasn't used.] 

Dunn, whose recollections are only partly reliable, then accompanied Rossetti to Whitechapel. 'Down many squalid streets we traversed and at last found ourselves in one broad thoroughfare  abounding with ships drawn up close to shore, their bowsprits overlapping into the roadway.   A  motley crowd of sailors of all nations and garbs and tongue thronged the place;  through this miscellaneous melee we passed until the Home was reached, and at last our search was rewarded by finding exactly the lad who was required;  and with explanations to the object of our mission, it was arranged that the little fellow should make his appearance at Cheyne Walk the following  day.

'The little Nubian came the next day, but as Rossetti remarked, he was so dusky that you could see his clothes moving about, but not the boy'.[H T Dunn Recollections 1984, 32-3]

The lad's near-invisibility perhaps owed more to the curtained gloom within the studio, and the poor eyesight that soon threatened the artist's livelihood, than to the tone of his skin, but does indicate his African origin.

It also contributed to his near-invisibility in the two coloured versions of the subject, one of which recently sold for £100k in London.

DG Rossetti, The Return of Tibullus to Delia, watercolour, 1868, Sothebys July 2022

Look carefully and Tibullus is stepping over his sleeping form.  [The brighter hues here in the 1867 version below are from the reproduction not the original] 

D G Rossetti, Return of Tibullus to Delia, watercolour 1867, unlocated