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In an Artist's Studio Summary & Analysis
by Christina Rossetti

In an Artist's Studio Summary & Analysis
by Christina Rossetti

  • Intro
  • Summary
  • Themes
  • Line-by-Line
    Explanations
  • Symbols
  • Poetic
    Devices
  • Vocabulary &
    References
  • Form, Meter, &
    Rhyme Scheme
  • Speaker
  • Setting
  • Context
  • Resources
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The Full Text of “In an Artist's Studio”

1One face looks out from all his canvases,

2One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:

3We found her hidden just behind those screens,

4That mirror gave back all her loveliness.

5A queen in opal or in ruby dress,

6A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,

7A saint, an angel—every canvas means

8The same one meaning, neither more or less.

9He feeds upon her face by day and night,

10And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,

11Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:

12Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;

13Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;

14Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

  • “In an Artist's Studio” Introduction

    • Christina Rossetti wrote "In an Artist's Studio" in 1856, but it wasn't published until 1896, two years after Rossetti's death. In this reflective sonnet, a speaker visits an artist's studio and finds a vast collection of portraits, all depicting the same gorgeous model. But the speaker knows this model personally—and while these pictures capture this woman's beautiful youth, they ignore the deep sadness of her present-day life. Caught up in his model's idealized loveliness, the artist seems to have missed (or disregarded) the "sorrow" of the living woman in front of him. This is a poem about objectification: in seeing his model only as a beautiful dream-girl, the artist overlooks her humanity.

  • “In an Artist's Studio” Summary

    • There's only one person depicted in all of this artist's paintings, one model simply posing in different ways. We used to come to the studio and find this model concealed behind those privacy screens over there, where the mirror reflected her intense beauty. In the paintings, she's portrayed as a queen in shimmering jewel-colored dresses, or as a lovely, anonymous girl wearing bright green, or as a saint, or an angel: every single painting says the same thing about her, nothing more and nothing less.

      The artist stares hungrily at her painted face all the time, and the portraits look gently and loyally back at him. In these paintings, the model is as beautiful as the moon and happy as sunlight. She's not pale from waiting around or muted by sadness. In the portraits, she's not the way she really is now, but the way she was when she was hopeful; she's not the way she really is now, but the way she is in the artist's dream-world.

  • “In an Artist's Studio” Themes

    • Theme Art and Objectification

      Art and Objectification

      The “Artist” of the poem’s title paints the same model over and over, always giving his portraits of her “the same one meaning”: she’s always a “goddess” or a “queen,” the perfect image of female beauty. But, as the poem’s observant speaker notes, this is far from the truth about this model. While she was once young, lovely, and hopeful, now she’s “wan” and full of “sorrow.” The artist is portraying her “Not as she is,” then, but rather “as she fills his dream.” Caught up in his ideal, the artist objectifies his model, unable to see her as a real person—and leaves her alone with her all-too-real suffering. This poem is a criticism not of any one artist in particular (though the painter here does bear some resemblance to Rossetti’s own brother!), but of a whole Victorian system of sexism that denied women their human complexity.

      The poem’s speaker, an observer who knows both the artist and his model, visits the artist’s studio only to be overwhelmed by all the portraits of this one woman. The artist is clearly obsessed with this model’s beauty—to the point that he can’t see anything about her but her lovely exterior. The speaker underlines just how fixated on this one woman the artist seems to be by observing that there’s “one face,” “one selfsame figure,” in “all his canvases.” What’s more, that face is always presented as a gorgeous “queen,” “angel,” or “nameless girl”: in other words, an idealized Victorian icon of female beauty and virtue.

      The speaker hints that there’s a problem here when she notes that this face always has “The same one meaning, neither more nor less.” The artist has looked endlessly at this one model’s face, but he always sees the same thing there: perfect, uncomplicated gorgeousness. In his eyes, it seems, there’s no other meaningful way for a woman to exist! In fact, there’s not even more than one way to be beautiful.

      The artist’s fixation on this model’s idealized beauty means that he misses (or ignores) some important truths about the real-life model’s suffering. In the real world, this model, whom the speaker knows, has become “wan with waiting” and “dim” with “sorrow.” But the artist either doesn’t notice his model’s suffering or doesn’t care. He’s busy “feed[ing]” on her painted face, like a vampire. Through his paintings, she becomes a mere decorative object, one he both “[feeds] on” and controls: in his portraits, she must always “[look] back at him” with the same “true kind eyes.”

      The artist's idealized, dream-world portraits of the woman capture all his attention: he sees her “Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.” In other words, his obsession with her beauty leads him to objectify his model, seeing her only as the lovely goddess of his paintings rather than as a real, live person—and especially not as a real, live person he seems to have hurt!

      In love with a reductive and sexist ideal, the artist can no longer see the living woman whose beauty he worships so faithfully. His blindness to his model’s human complexity makes him unwittingly (or callously) cruel. He’s an indictment of a Victorian perspective on women as a whole: if women must only be beautiful, virtuous paragons, this poem suggests, they can’t be full human beings.

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “In an Artist's Studio”

    • Lines 1-2

      One face looks out from all his canvases,
      One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:

      This poem's title, "In an Artist's Studio," immediately places readers in a specific setting: a painter's studio. The first lines make that setting feel both strange and intense. In this whole studio, there's only "One face" in any of the paintings. This artist, it seems, is a man obsessed with one single subject, one model.

      The speaker seems as struck by this discovery as the reader might be. The first two lines here insist on the artist's obsession through repetition:

      One face looks out from all his canvases,
      One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:

      Here, anaphora on the word "one" and parallelism between these lines makes the poem reflect what it describes. These repetitions are a lot like the repetitions between the paintings, which show the "selfsame figure" as she "sits or walks or leans" in various poses. The language here captures this artist's obsessive focus.

      A little context about this poem might give the reader an even more vivid picture of this studio. The author, Christina Rossetti, was the sister of a famous Pre-Raphaelite painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was indeed obsessed with one model: the unfortunate (and gorgeous) Lizzie Siddal. Siddal modeled for Dante Gabriel Rossetti (a dangerous profession for a woman in the Victorian era, when modeling was considered next door to prostitution), waited around for 10 years for him to keep his promise to marry her, and then promptly died of a laudanum overdose.

      While this poem isn't explicitly about the relationship between Rossetti, her brother, and his model, a lot of the detail here hints that Rossetti has this sad story in mind—and that perhaps she, as a woman artist, feels a certain kinship with the artist's model. This will be a poem about the way male artistic ideals can trample on women's humanity.

    • Lines 3-4

      We found her hidden just behind those screens,
      That mirror gave back all her loveliness.

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    • Lines 5-8

      A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
      A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
      A saint, an angel—every canvas means
      The same one meaning, neither more or less.

    • Lines 9-10

      He feeds upon her face by day and night,
      And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,

    • Lines 11-12

      Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
      Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;

    • Lines 13-14

      Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
      Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

  • “In an Artist's Studio” Symbols

    • Symbol The Paintings

      The Paintings

      The paintings in this "Artist's Studio" symbolize the sexist male gaze. These paintings are physical representations of an unpleasant inner truth: caught up in his model's beauty, the artist can no longer see her as a real person. Instead, he paints an endless series of portraits in which the model is an idealized figure: a queen, a saint, an angel, and perhaps most painfully, a "nameless girl"—the idea of girlness rather than a living, breathing woman. These paintings might capture the model's beauty like a mirror, but they're also a lot like the "screens" she used to pose behind, concealing rather than revealing her real self.

      The paintings thus stand for a way that women could expect to be treated in Victorian society (and, alas, sometimes in contemporary society): as ideas or ideals, not people.

  • “In an Artist's Studio” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Alliteration

      Moments of alliteration give this poem both music and meaning. On the one hand, alliteration simply sounds good—but, being a little different from everyday speech, it also attracts attention, directing the reader to important moments in the poem.

      Early on in the poem, for example, sibilant alliteration evokes the harmonious beauty of the artist's portraits. Look at the way the /s/ sound travels through this line (as both alliteration and consonance): "One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans": the initial /s/ alliteration of "selfsame" and "sits" chimes in with subtler internal sibilance to evoke these pictures' quiet beauty. Those /s/ sounds make it seem as if the speaker can almost hear the model's silky dresses rustling as she poses for painting after painting.

      All that gentle beauty gets disturbed with a very different moment of alliteration in line 9, in which the artist "feeds upon [his model's] face by day and night." That brisk /f/ alliteration frames an already alarming metaphor, in which the artist seems to become a sort of beauty-vampire, endlessly drawn back to "feed" on his model's painted perfection. And by the end of the poem, when the model is "wan with waiting," that /w/ alliteration makes it seem as if wanness (or paleness) and waiting around go hand in hand.

    • Assonance

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    • Caesura

    • End-Stopped Line

    • Personification

    • Asyndeton

    • Repetition

    • Simile

    • Metaphor

  • “In an Artist's Studio” Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Canvases
    • Selfsame
    • Screens
    • Wan
    Canvases

    • Paintings.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “In an Artist's Studio”

    • Form

      Like many of Christina Rossetti's poems, "In an Artist's Studio" is a Petrarchan sonnet, also known as an Italian sonnet. Named for the medieval Italian poet Petrarch (an early master of the form), a Petrarchan sonnet uses 14 lines, divided into an octet (the first eight lines) and a sestet (the last six lines). The octet develops a theme, and the sestet introduces a volta, or "turn," which moves the poem in a different direction.

      In this poem, the opening octet describes the artist's many portraits of the same beautiful model. The closing sestet has a darker feel, observing that the real-life model isn't quite so ideally happy and lovely anymore.

      Rossetti's use of the Petrarchan sonnet form gives this poem some grandeur and weight, making it part of an ancient poetic tradition. This form also speaks to her own history: her father was an Italian immigrant, and she and her siblings (including her brother, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who has a lot in common with the "Artist" of this poem) were immersed in Italian literature all through their childhoods.

    • Meter

      Like all sonnets, "In an Artist's Studio" uses iambic pentameter. That means that each line has five iambs, metrical feet that follow a da-DUM stress pattern. Take line 9:

      He feeds | upon | her face | by day | and night,

      But like a lot of sonnets, this one often does some fancy footwork within its pentameter, moving stresses around to emphasize important moments. For instance, take a look at what happens at the end of the poem:

      Not as | she is, | but was | when hope | shone bright;
      Not as | she is, | but as | she fills | his dream.

      These two closing lines start with trochees, feet that go DUM-da. That front-loaded meter makes the speaker's closing thoughts feel urgent and pointed: as she insists that these portraits show the model "Not as she is," she leans hard on the word "Not."

    • Rhyme Scheme

      Petrarchan sonnets like "In an Artist's Studio" use a rhyme scheme that's both regular and flexible. The scheme here goes like this:

      ABBA ABBA CDCDCE

      Almost every Petrarchan sonnet starts with that ABBA ABBA pattern in the first eight lines (or the "octet"), and then moves into a more variable and complicated pattern for the last six lines (the "sestet").

      Here, the speaker does something especially clever in the sestet, using assonant slant rhyme to tie the whole poem up in a bow. The first four lines of the sestet uses a regular, back-and-forth CDCD scheme—one the reader might expect the last two lines to follow, too. But look what happens in lines 13-14:

      Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
      Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

      The poem ends on a new rhyme, an E that doesn't match any word that's come before. But look closer: "dream" echoes both the consonant sounds of "dim" in line 12 and the /ee/ sounds of the B rhymes from the octet: "leans," "screens," "greens," and "means."

      This "dream," then, is connected to what's going on around the artist, but also just a little bit out of whack: and that's exactly what's happening in the poem! This almost-rhyme reflects the artist's idealized, illusory dream-world.

  • “In an Artist's Studio” Speaker

    • We've used female pronouns throughout this guide because the poem's speaker has so much in common with Christina Rossetti herself. Rossetti was a member of a big artistic family, and her brother Dante Gabriel was a famous Pre-Raphaelite painter, known both for his gorgeous portraits of beautiful women (especially Lizzie Siddal, the likely inspiration for the model in this poem) and his philandering. Rossetti had plenty of opportunity to visit her brother's studio, and to observe his many models' suffering.

      If the speaker is indeed a self-portrait of Rossetti, she's also an artist in her own right, a poet. As both an artist and a woman, perhaps she has a special perspective on this situation: she's able to see the studio from both the artist's and the model's point of view.

      But the reader doesn't have to interpret the speaker as a Rossetti-like figure (or even a woman) to get a sense of who this person is, which the poem reveals not through any direct description, but through what the speaker observes. She's a sensitive, thoughtful, and compassionate person. While she deeply appreciates the jewel-like beauty of the artist's portraits, she can also see past it to the real live woman who sat for these pictures. The artist might not notice that the model has become "wan with waiting," but this speaker sure does.

  • “In an Artist's Studio” Setting

    • As soon as they read the poem's title, readers know that this poem is set "In an Artist's Studio." This is a Victorian painter's workplace, with practical "screens" to shield naked models and a "mirror" in which they can fix themselves up before they pose. But it's also a dreamland. On every wall hang dozens of gorgeous portraits of the same woman, cast as a queen, an angel, or just an anonymous, beautiful girl. Readers who have looked at some Pre-Raphaelite art will be able to imagine just how rich, bright, and fantastical this room must look.

      The enchanting beauty of this studio conceals a sad secret. Beyond all those beautiful pictures is the model: a real woman, now "wan" and sorrowful, a far cry from the shining joyful girl of the portraits. She may once have been literally "hidden just behind those screens," posing—but she's also metaphorically "hidden" behind the "screens" of all these idealized paintings.

      The gorgeous studio and its "screens" are thus both a celebration of beauty and a warning against getting too caught up in an artistic "dream." Surrounded by portraits of the lovely model, the artist can no longer see her genuine suffering.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “In an Artist's Studio”

      Literary Context

      Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) lived and worked right in the heart of the Victorian Pre-Raphaelite movement, a circle of artists who wanted to bring back medieval ideals of art and craft—with their own luxurious contemporary twist. Rossetti was a member of a large and talented artistic family, the English children of Italian immigrants. She was particularly close with her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a painter whose life and work seem to have had a big influence on this poem.

      While Rossetti was a popular and well-known poet during her lifetime, "In an Artist's Studio" wasn't published until after her death, when her brother William printed it in an 1896 collection called New Poems by Christina Rossetti.

      This poem reflects Rossetti's life and work both in its shape and its themes. Rossetti's father was a scholar of Italian literature, so she knew the great Italian poets Dante and Petrarch from a young age. This is only one of Rossetti's many sonnets that use the Italian (or Petrarchan) form.

      Rossetti also had plenty of opportunities to think about women's role in the art world. A popular woman poet, she was one of a rare breed in Victorian England. Many saw her as a successor to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, both because the two shared a fondness for sonnets and Italy, and because there weren't many other female poets around to compare her to! Rossetti was also surrounded by male Pre-Raphaelite painters, whose behavior was often much like that of the "Artist" in this poem: while they idealized female beauty, they weren't always kind to the actual women in their lives. Rossetti's poetic objections to this kind of treatment made her an inspiring early feminist figure. She's still studied (and revered) today, and her poetry has influenced writers from Virginia Woolf to Philip Larkin.

      Historical Context

      When Christina Rossetti was writing in the Victorian era, women simply were not expected to be artists. Rossetti was born into a deeply conservative England, a world in which women were still essentially seen as the property of their husbands and fathers. Women's options were few: wife, governess, servant, or prostitute were the four basic "career paths" available to most. (One notable exception to this rule, of course, was Queen Victoria herself!)

      Within these narrow bounds, women were also expected to be chaste and submissive, and not to put a foot out of line. The model in this poem would have been considered more than a little scandalous: posing for male painters was seen as just next door to prostitution.

      Somehow, within this repressive landscape, women writers still flourished (even if they sometimes had to take male pen names, as George Eliot did). Rossetti's work was part of a tide of bold poetry and fiction by Victorian women like Charlotte and Emily Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning— art that's still respected and beloved today.

  • More “In an Artist's Studio” Resources

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