Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The poet of the Pre-Raphaelites.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. He painted dreamy women from Dante and medieval legend.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born in London in 1828. His father, Gabriele Rossetti, was an Italian political refugee and Dante scholar who taught Italian. The home was full of literature and politics. All four children became writers, and his sister Christina Rossetti became one of England's foremost poets. Dante Gabriel studied at the Royal Academy Schools and briefly under the painter Ford Madox Brown.
In 1848 he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood together with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. They wanted to return to the sincerity and wealth of detail they believed existed in art before Raphael. Rossetti's early painting Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1849–50) in Tate shows the Annunciation with a shy young Mary in white. He was as much a poet as a painter and often wrote poems to accompany his pictures.
His model and great love was Elizabeth Siddal, who herself painted and wrote. They married in 1860, but she died in 1862 of an overdose of laudanum. Rossetti placed a manuscript of his poems in her coffin but had it exhumed a few years later in order to publish them. In her memory he painted Beata Beatrix, now in Tate, in which she is portrayed as Dante's Beatrice in a moment of spiritual ecstasy.
In the 1860s and 70s Rossetti painted almost nothing but half-length women with full lips, long flowing hair and rich, dark colours. His most important model became Jane Morris, wife of his friend William Morris, and they had a long relationship. Proserpine (1874) in Tate is a well-known example. Over the years Rossetti became addicted to the sleeping drug chloral and suffered from paranoia. He died in 1882.
Rossetti strongly influenced Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and the Aesthetic Movement. His dreamlike images of women point forward to Symbolism. He is one of the few artists as famous for his poetry as for his painting.