Page:Chats on old prints (IA chatsonoldprints00haydiala).pdf/147

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worth considering in detail. Rossetti pronounced him "the greatest of living draughtsmen." He exhibited at the Royal Academy before he was twenty years of age, and from 1851 to 1886 his exhibits number forty-seven, mainly portraits in crayons. He lived with Rossetti for many years at Chelsea, and though not a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he made their ideals his. The fascination of mediæval lore and the spell of mysticism had alike seized the minds of artists and poets. The great Arthurian legion had captivated Tennyson, and Sandys in his designs recalls the virility and symbolism of Albert Dürer.

Whereas Dürer's designs were spread across Europe from Nuremburg to Venice, the woodcuts after Sandys were limited to the Cornhill Magazine, Once a Week, The Quiver, Good Words, The Argosy, The Churchman's Family Magazine, and The Shilling Magazine.

The illustration reproduced of Cleopatra appeared in Cornhill in 1866 as an illustration to a poem by Swinburne of the same title; the wood block was cut by Dalziel.

The poem and the illustration are wedded. It would seem as if Swinburne had seen the drawing of Sandys when he wrote:—

"Her great curled hair makes luminous
  Her cheeks, her lifted throat and chin.
Shall she not have the heart of us
  To shatter and the loves therein
To shed between her fingers thus?