Quotes, label copy and Delaware Art Museum’s library database description are used here with permission of Margaretta S. Frederick, Curator of the Bancroft Collection.
Label Copy
My Beautiful Lady/My Lady in Death, 1850, from The Germ, January 1850
William Holman Hunt (1827-1910)
engraving
Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Pre-Raphaelite Manuscript Collection, Helen Farr Sloan Library, Delaware Art Museum
One of their earliest joint efforts of the P.R.B. was the production of The Germ, a short-lived periodical (January-April/May 1850) of poetry and prose entirely conceived and produced by the original P.R.B. members, their family and friends. This double illustration by William Holman Hunt accompanied a poem by Thomas Woolner, the sculptor of the group, in which a young man celebrates his love and then mourns her death. Hunt stylistically echoes the disparity in emotional tone of the two sections of the poem. The top image in which the soft flowing curves of the landscape are emphasized is in marked contrast to the stark rectilinear lines of the mourners and the prone figure below.
Library database entry for the copy of The Germ currently on view:
| 1, On shelf | |
| Call | BANCROFT AP4 .G31 |
| Author | Noble, James Ashcroft, 1844-1896.; Samuel Bancroft Personal Library. |
| Title | The germ : thoughts towards nature in poetry, literature, and art / MDCCCL. |
| Notes | One of a limited edition of 450 copies printed on Van Gelder hand-made paper. |
| A reprint of the literary organ of the Pre-Raphaelites, originally issued in four numbers from Jan.-Apr. 30, 1850. (No. 1-2 entitled: The Germ: no. 3-4: Art and poetry). | |
| “A Pre-Raphaelite magazine [by] J. Ashcroft Noble”: p. xv-xxix, [1] (Originally appeared in Fraser’s magazine for May, 1882). | |
| Publisher | Portland, ME : T.B. Mosher, 1898. |
| LCCN | 07015357 |
| Phys Desc | xxix, [1] p., 1 leaf, 224 p. : plates, facsim. ; 24 |