The London born painter Theodor von Holst occupies a unique position in the history of British Romantic Art between his vivacious and eccentric master Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) and his most important admirer Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). Together Holst and Rossetti form an artistic bridge from the art of the Regency to that of the Symbolists and the Aesthetic Movement at the end of the 19th Century and beyond. However the nature of their extraordinary romantic output appealed to the connoisseur rather
As part of his contribution to Gilchrist's Life of William Blake (1863), Rossetti praised Holst and described him 'as a link of some consequence' between the earlier generation of history painters and the Pre-Raphaelite circle, who frequented a particular West End restaurant because it was hung with Holst's pictures. Rossetti's first widely published poem The Card-Player was based on The Wish painted by Holst in 1841. Had he lived longer it is intriguing to speculate that Rossetti might have approached his
Unfortunately the fantastic, supernatural and erotic content of Holst's art precluded favour with the increasingly bourgeois London public of the 1830s and 40s despite the high praise bestowed on him by his peers. The resultant neglect and obscurity into which his work had fallen, until the 1960s, is to be much regretted and it is mouth-watering to consider the dozens of paintings and hundreds of drawings that remain to be discovered. However by the early 1990s a sufficient body of work had come to light to