If

Frederick Sandys

Date: 1866

Materials: Pen & Ink

Book illustration

The burgeoning demand for book and magazine illustration in the 1860s provided much-needed work for Sandy sand helped him to establish a lasting reputation. 

Sparing no effort to ensure these commissions where of the highest quality, he made a large number a preparatory studies, many of which are now held in Birmingham. 

Hope against Hope

'If' illustrates a poem (later called 'Hope against Hope' ) by Christina Rossetti.

The lone female figure in an elemental landscape is brooding on the absence of her lover.

"If he would come to-day, to-day,Oh what a day to-day would be!"

Rossetti's motif

The billowing dress is based on a chalk study held at Birmingham whilst the background is from a drawing made by Sandys in 1858 at Weybourne Cliff, near Sheringham in Norfolk.

The figure's pose is similar to that in Sandys's 'Until her Death' (1862), but the addition of the girl sucking her hair (a motif used before by Rossetti) creates a certain tension in the picture.