In App Screenshot: Boulevard AR app experience. Dante Gabriel Rossetti reading poetry to Theodore Watts-Dunton, painting by Henry Treffry Dunn.
When we collaborated with the National Portrait Gallery of London to make an AR experience of its famous double portrait of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Theodore Watt-Dunton by Henry Treffry-Dunn, we wanted to highlight aspects of the painted scene, but also to evoke the larger sense of creative community that flourished within Rossetti’s special, idiosyncratically-decorated home, Tudor House, at Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. One way to achieve this was to pop out a convex mirror in augmented reality, as these mirrors were so important to 19th-century artists, as well as to Rossetti’s overall sensibility and decorating scheme, particularly for his sitting room where he frequently entertained. Another concept was to bring in period music, to infiltrate the space and evoke a Victorian-era mood. And finally, most important to our theme was to integrate the aural sense of poetry, using Rossetti’s words.
As was common in his circle, Rossetti worked across a range of mediums. Known primarily as a painter, designer and illustrator, he was also a translator of courtly love poems and considered poetry his true calling. In Henry Treffry-Dunn’s posthumous painting, we see Rossetti sharing some of his own poetry with his companion Theodore Watts-Dunton. As a writer, poet, and critic, Theodore Watts-Dunton not only proved a faithful friend, but frequent sounding board and foil for Rossetti’s creative ideas. Watts-Dunton’s editorial opinions often became Rossetti’s own, and he modified his work accordingly, suggesting a deep, collaborative bond.
The ballad “Rose Mary,” was a part of Rossetti’s 1881 collection of poems, Ballads and Sonnets. Rossetti is shown reading a draft of the collection to Watts-Dunton, to whom the book is dedicated. We wanted to elevate this vignette from the picture, not only by giving it extra dimensionality in AR, but by capturing the essence of enthralled listening. It seemed only appropriate then to incorporate some of Rose Mary within our experience, which we did. (excerpt below):
The altar stood from its curved recess
In a coiling serpent’s life-likeness:
Even such a serpent evermore
Lies deep asleep at the world’s dark core
Till the last Voice shake the sea and shore
From the altar-cloth a book rose spread
And tapers burned at the altar-head;
And there in the altar-midst alone,
‘Twixt wings of a sculptured beast unknown,
Rose Mary saw the Beryl-stone.
Firm it sat ‘twixt the hollow wings,
As an orb sits in the hand of kings:
And lo! For that Foe whose curse far-flown
Had bound her life with a burning zone
Rose Mary knew the Beryl-stone.