Algernon Charles Swinburne

Rossetti drew this small watercolour of his friend in 1861, when Algernon Swinburne was a red-haired young poet of about 24 whom almost nobody had yet read. The two moved in the same close Pre-Raphaelite circle, and for a while Swinburne lodged in Rossetti's rambling house on the Chelsea riverfront, among a household menagerie that at various points included wombats. What the drawing cannot know is what came next. Five years later Swinburne published Poems and Ballads, whose frank verses on pain and desire raised such an outcry that his own publisher pulled the book from sale and handed it to another house.