Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Rossetti's first major paintings in oil display the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. His Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850) portray Mary as a teenage girl. William Bell Scott saw Girlhood in progress in Hunt's studio and remarked on young Rossetti's technique:

He was painting in oils with water-colour brushes, as thinly as in water-colour, on canvas which he had primed with white till the surface was a smooth as cardboard, and every tint remained transparent. I saw at once that he was not an orthodox boy, but acting purely from the aesthetic motive. The mixture of genius and dilettantism of both men shut me up for the moment, and whetted my curiosity.[13]

Stung by criticism of his second major painting, Ecce Ancilla Domini, exhibited in 1850, and the "increasingly hysterical critical reaction that greeted Pre-Raphaelitism" that year, Rossetti turned to watercolours, which could be sold privately. Although his work subsequently won support from John Ruskin, Rossetti only rarely exhibited thereafter.[5]

In 1850, Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal, an important model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Over the next decade, she became his muse, his pupil, and his passion. They were married in 1860.[14] Rossetti's incomplete picture Found, begun in 1853 and unfinished at his death, was his only major modern-life subject. It depicted a prostitute, lifted from the street by a country drover who recognises his old sweetheart. However, Rossetti increasingly preferred symbolic and mythological images to realistic ones.[15]

For many years, Rossetti worked on English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova (published as The Early Italian Poets in 1861). These and Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur inspired his art of the 1850s. He created a method of painting in watercolours, using thick pigments mixed with gum to give rich effects similar to medieval illuminations. He also developed a novel drawing technique in pen-and-ink. His first published illustration was "The Maids of Elfen-Mere" (1855), for a poem by his friend William Allingham, and he contributed two illustrations to Edward Moxon's 1857 edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Poems and illustrations for works by his sister Christina Rossetti.[16]

His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.[17] Neither Burne-Jones nor Morris knew Rossetti, but were much influenced by his works, and met him by recruiting him as a contributor to their Oxford and Cambridge Magazine which Morris founded in 1856 to promote his ideas about art and poetry.[18][19]

Ecce Ancilla Domini!, 1850, a depiction of the Annunciation

In February 1857, Rossetti wrote to William Bell Scott:

Two young men, projectors of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, have recently come up to town from Oxford, and are now very intimate friends of mine. Their names are Morris and Jones. They have turned artists instead of taking up any other career to which the university generally leads, and both are men of real genius. Jones's designs are marvels of finish and imaginative detail, unequalled by anything unless perhaps Albert Dürer's finest works.[18]

That summer Morris and Rossetti visited Oxford and finding the Oxford Union debating-hall under construction, pursued a commission to paint the upper walls with scenes from Le Morte d'Arthur and to decorate the roof between the open timbers. Seven artists were recruited, among them Valentine Prinsep and Arthur Hughes,[20] and the work was hastily begun. The frescoes, done too soon and too fast, began to fade at once and now are barely decipherable. Rossetti recruited two sisters, Bessie and Jane Burden, as models for the Oxford Union murals, and Jane became Morris's wife in 1859.[21]

Literature was integrated into the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's artistic practice from the beginning (including that of Rossetti), with many paintings making direct literary references. For example, John Everett Millais' early work, Isabella (1849), depicts an episode from John Keats' Isabella, or, the Pot of Basil (1818). Rossetti was particularly critical of the gaudy ornamentation of Victorian gift books and sought to refine bindings and illustrations to align with the principles of the Aesthetic Movement.[22] Rossetti's key bindings were designed between 1861 and 1871.[23] He collaborated as a designer/illustrator with his sister, poet Christina Rossetti, on the first edition of Goblin Market (1862) and The Prince's Progress (1866).

Sir Galahad at the ruined Chapel, watercolour and bodycolour, 1857-59

One of Rossetti's most prominent contributions to illustration was the collaborative book, Poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (published by Edward Moxon in 1857 and known colloquially as the 'Moxon Tennyson'). Moxon envisioned Royal Academicians as the illustrators for the ambitious project, but this vision was quickly disrupted once Millais, a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, became involved in the project.[24] Millais recruited William Holman Hunt and Rossetti for the project, and the involvement of these artists reshaped the entire production of the book. In reference to the Pre-Raphaelite illustrations, Laurence Housman wrote "[...] The illustrations of the Pre-Raphaelites were personal and intellectual readings of the poems to which they belonged, not merely echoes in line of the words of the text."[25] The Pre-Raphaelites' visualization of Tennyson's poems indicated the range of possibilities in interpreting written works, as did their unique approach to visualizing narrative on the canvas.[24]

Pre-Raphaelite illustrations do not simply refer to the text in which they appear; rather, they are part of a bigger program of art: the book as a whole. Rossetti's philosophy about the role of illustration was revealed in an 1855 letter to poet William Allingham, when he wrote, in reference to his work on the Moxon Tennyson:

"I have not begun even designing for them yet, but fancy I shall try the Vision of Sin, and Palace of Art etc.—those where one can allegorize on one's own hook, without killing for oneself and everyone a distinct idea of the poet's."[26]

This passage makes apparent Rossetti's desire not to just support the poet's narrative, but to create an allegorical illustration that functions separately from the text as well. In this respect, Pre-Raphaelite illustrations go beyond depicting an episode from a poem, but rather function like subject paintings within a text. Illustration is not subservient to text and vice versa. Careful and conscientious craftsmanship is practiced in every aspect of production, and each element, though qualifiedly artistic in its own right, contributes to a unified art object (the book).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti by George Wylie Hutchinson

England began to see a revival of religious beliefs and practices starting in 1833 and moving onward to about 1845.[27] The Oxford Movement, also known as the Tractarian Movement, had recently begun a push toward the restoration of Christian traditions that had been lost in the Church of England. Rossetti and his family had been attending Christ Church, Albany Street since 1843. His brother, William Michael Rossetti recorded that services had begun changing in the church since the start of the "High Anglican movement". Rev. William Dodsworth was responsible for these changes, including the addition of the Catholic practice of placing flowers and candles by the altar. Rossetti and his family, along with two of his colleagues (one of which cofounded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) had also attended St. Andrew's on Wells Street, a High Anglican church. It is noted that the Anglo-Catholic revival very much affected Rossetti in the late 1840s and early 1850s. The spiritual expressions of his painting The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, finished in 1849, are evident of this claim. The painting's altar is decorated very similarly to that of a Catholic altar, proving his familiarity with the Anglo-Catholic revival. The subject of the painting, the Blessed Virgin, is sewing a red cloth, a significant part of the Oxford Movement that emphasized the embroidering of altar cloths by women.[28] Oxford Reformers identified two major aspects to their movement, that "the end of all religion must be communion with God," and "that the Church was divinely instituted for the very purpose of bringing about this consummation."[29]

From the beginning of the Brotherhood's formation in 1848, their pieces of art included subjects of noble or religious disposition. Their aim was to communicate a message of "moral reform" through the style of their works, exhibiting a "truth to nature".[30] Specifically in Rossetti's "Hand and Soul", written in 1849, he displays his main character Chiaro as an artist with spiritual inclinations. In the text, Chiaro's spirit appears before him in the form of a woman who instructs him to "set thine hand and thy soul to serve man with God."[31] The Rossetti Archive defines this text as "Rossetti's way of constellating his commitments to art, religious devotion, and a thoroughly secular historicism."[32] Likewise, in "The Blessed Damozel", written between 1847 and 1870, Rossetti uses biblical language such as "From the gold bar of Heaven" to describe the Damozel looking down to Earth from Heaven.[33] Here we see a connection between body and soul, mortal and supernatural, a common theme in Rossetti's works. In "Ave" (1847), Mary awaits the day that she will meet her son in Heaven, uniting the earthly with the heavenly. The text highlights a strong element in Anglican Marian theology that describes Mary's body and soul having been assumed into Heaven.[28] William Michael Rossetti, his brother, wrote in 1895: "He was never confirmed, professed no religious faith, and practised no regular religious observances; but he had ... sufficient sympathy with the abstract ideas and the venerable forms of Christianity to go occasionally to an Anglican church — very occasionally, and only as the inclination ruled him."

Bocca Baciata (1859), modelled by Fanny Cornforth, signalled a new direction in Rossetti's work (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Around 1860, Rossetti returned to oil painting, abandoning the dense medieval compositions of the 1850s in favour of powerful close-up images of women in flat pictorial spaces characterised by dense colour. These paintings became a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement.[34] In them, Rossetti's depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He portrayed his new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism, whilst Jane Burden, the wife of his business partner William Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess. "As in Rossetti's previous reforms, the new kind of subject appeared in the context of a wholesale reconfiguration of the practice of painting, from the most basic level of materials and techniques up to the most abstract or conceptual level of the meanings and ideas that can be embodied in visual form."[34] These new works were based not on medievalism, but on the Italian High Renaissance artists of Venice, Titian and Veronese.[34][35]

In 1861, Rossetti became a founding partner in the decorative arts firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with Morris, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, Philip Webb, Charles Faulkner and Peter Paul Marshall.[19] Rossetti contributed designs for stained glass and other decorative objects.

Rossetti's wife, Elizabeth, died of an overdose of laudanum in 1862, possibly a suicide, shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child.[36][37] Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and when Elizabeth was buried at Highgate Cemetery, he interred the bulk of his unpublished poems with her, though he later had them dug up. He idealised her image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as Beata Beatrix.[38]

Albumen print of Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll; 1863)

His home at 16 Cheyne Walk, London

After the death of his wife, Rossetti leased a Tudor House at 16, Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea,[39] where he lived for 20 years surrounded by extravagant furnishings and a parade of exotic birds and animals.[40] Rossetti was fascinated with wombats, asking friends to meet him at the "Wombat's Lair" at the London Zoo in Regent's Park, and spending hours there. In September 1869, he acquired the first of two pet wombats, which he named "Top". It was brought to the dinner table and allowed to sleep in the large centrepiece during meals. Rossetti's fascination with exotic animals continued throughout his life, culminating in the purchase of a llama and a toucan, which he dressed in a cowboy hat and trained to ride the llama round the dining-table for his amusement.[41]

Rossetti maintained Fanny Cornforth (described delicately by William Allington as Rossetti's "housekeeper")[42] in her own establishment nearby in Chelsea, and painted many voluptuous images of her between 1863 and 1865.[43]

The Roman Widow (1874), Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico

In 1865, he discovered auburn-haired Alexa Wilding, a dressmaker and would-be actress who was engaged to model for him on a full-time basis and sat for Veronica Veronese, The Blessed Damozel, A Sea–Spell, and other paintings.[44][45] She sat for more of his finished works than any other model, but comparatively little is known about her due to the lack of any romantic connection with Rossetti. He spotted her one evening in the Strand in 1865 and was immediately struck by her beauty. She agreed to sit for him the following day, but failed to arrive. He spotted her again weeks later, jumped from the cab he was in and persuaded her to go straight to his studio. He paid her a weekly fee to sit for him exclusively, afraid that other artists might employ her.[46] They shared a lasting bond; after Rossetti's death Wilding was said to have travelled regularly to place a wreath on his grave.[47]

Jane Morris, whom Rossetti had used as a model for the Oxford Union murals he painted with William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones in 1857, also sat for him during these years, she "consumed and obsessed him in paint, poetry, and life".[44] Jane Morris was also photographed by John Robert Parsons, whose photographs were painted by Rossetti. In 1869, Morris and Rossetti rented a country house, Kelmscott Manor at Kelmscott, Oxfordshire, as a summer home, but it became a retreat for Rossetti and Jane Morris to have a long-lasting and complicated liaison. They spent summers there with the Morrises' children, while William Morris travelled to Iceland in 1871 and 1873.[48]

Rossetti reading proofs of Ballads and Sonnets at 16 Cheyne Walk, by Henry Treffry Dunn (1882)

During these years, Rossetti was prevailed upon by friends, in particular Charles Augustus Howell, to exhume his poems from his wife's grave which he did, collating and publishing them in 1870 in the volume Poems by D. G. Rossetti. They created controversy when they were attacked as the epitome of the "fleshly school of poetry". Their eroticism and sensuality caused offence. One poem, "Nuptial Sleep", described a couple falling asleep after sex. It was part of Rossetti's sonnet sequence The House of Life, a complex series of poems tracing the physical and spiritual development of an intimate relationship. Rossetti described the sonnet form as a "moment's monument", implying that it sought to contain the feelings of a fleeting moment, and reflect on their meaning. The House of Life was a series of interacting monuments to these moments – an elaborate whole made from a mosaic of intensely described fragments. It was Rossetti's most substantial literary achievement. The collection included some translations, including his "Ballad Of Dead Ladies", an 1869 translation of François Villon's poem "Ballade des dames du temps jadis". (The word "yesteryear" is credited to Rossetti as a neologism used for the first time in this translation.)

In 1881, Rossetti published a second volume of poems, Ballads and Sonnets, which included the remaining sonnets from The House of Life sequence.

The Day Dream (1880). The sitter is Jane Morris.[49][50]

Alexa Wilding (1879)

• 
  The Tune of the Seven Towers (1857), watercolour, Tate Britain
• 
  Helen of Troy, 1863, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
• 
  How Sir Galahad. Sir Bors, and Sir Percival were fed with the Sanc Grael; But Sir Percival's Sister Died Along the Way (1864), watercolour, Tate Britain, London
• 
  The Beloved (1865-1866) (Models:Marie Ford, Ellen Smith, Fanny Eaton, Keomi), Tate
• 
  Found (1865–1869, unfinished), Delaware Art Museum
• 
  The Blessed Damozel (1871–1878; model: Alexa Wilding)
• 
  Lady Lilith (1867), Metropolitan Museum of Art (model: Fanny Cornforth)
• 
  Lady Lilith (1868), Delaware Art Museum (Fanny Cornforth, overpainted at Kelsmcott 1872–73 with the face of Alexa Wilding)[64]
• 
  Beata Beatrix (1864–1870), Tate Britain (model: Elizabeth Siddal)
• 
  Jane Morris (The Blue Silk Dress) (1868), Kelmscott Manor
• 
  Pia de' Tolomei (1868–1880), Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence (model: Jane Morris)
• 
  Mariana (1870; model: Jane Morris), Aberdeen Art Gallery
• 
  Proserpine (1874; model: Jane Morris) Tate Britain, London
• 
  A Vision of Fiammetta (1878), one of Rossetti's last paintings, now in the collection of Andrew Lloyd Webber (model: Marie Spartali Stillman)

• 
  La Belle Dame sans Merci (1848), pen and sepia with some pencil
• 
  Drawing of Elizabeth Siddal reading (1854)
• 
  Hamlet and Ophelia (1858), pen and ink drawing
• 
  Drawing of Annie Miller (1860)
• 
  Portrait of Marie Spartali Stillman (1869)
• 
  Drawing of Fanny Cornforth, graphite on paper (1869)
• 
  The Roseleaf (Portrait of Jane Morris; 1870), graphite on wove paper
• 
  Ligeia Siren (1873), colored chalk

• 
  The Maids of Elphen-Mere, Rossetti's first published woodcut illustration (1855)
• 
  King Arthur and the Weeping Queens, one of two illustrations by Rossetti for Edward Moxon's illustrated edition of Tennyson's Poems (1857)
• 
  Golden Head by Golden Head, illustration for Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)

• 
  Sir Tristram and la Belle Ysoude drink the potion, stained-glass panel by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., design by Rossetti (1862–63)

• 
  Death of a Wombat (1869)
• 
  William Morris reading to Jane Morris while she takes the waters at Bad Ems (1869)
• 
  Mrs. Morris and the Wombat (1869)

• The Early Italian Poets (a translation), 1861; republished as Dante and His Circle, 1874
• Poems, 1870; revised and reissued as Poems. A New Edition, 1881
• Ballads and Sonnets, 1881
• The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 2 volumes, 1886 (posthumous)
• Ballads and Narrative Poems, 1893 (posthumous)
• Sonnets and Lyrical Poems, 1894 (posthumous)
• The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1911 (posthumous)[65]
• Poems and Translations 1850–1870, Together with the Prose Story 'Hand and Soul', Oxford University Press, 1913

"Rossetti divided his attention between painting and poetry for the rest of his life" - Poetry Foundation[4]

• Aspecta Medusa (1865 October – 1868)
• Astarte Syriaca (for a Picture; 1877 January–February; 1875–1877)
• Beatrice, her Damozels, and Love (1865?)
• Beauty and the Bird (1855; 1858 June 25)
• The Blessed Damozel (1847–1870; 1871–1881)
• Bocca Baciata (1859–1860)
• Body's Beauty (1864–1869; 1866)
• The Bride's Prelude [1848–1870 (circa)]
• Cassandra (for a drawing; September 1869; 1860–1861, 1867, 1869)
• Dante's Dream on the Day of the Death of Beatrice: 9 June 1290 (1875 [?], 1856)
• Dante Alighieri. "Sestina. Of the Lady Pietra degli Scrovigni." (1848 [?], 1861, 1874)
• Dante at Verona [1848–1850; 1852 (circa)]
• The Day-Dream (for a picture; 1878–1880, 1880 September)
• Death of A Wombat (6 November 1869)
• Eden Bower [1863–1864 (circa) or 1869 (circa)]
• Fazio's Mistress (1863; 1873)
• Fiammetta [for a picture; 1878 (circa) 1878]
• "Found" (for a picture; 1854; 1881 February)
• Francesca Da Rimini. Dante (1855; 1862 September)
• Guido Cavalcanti. "Ballata. He reveals, in a Dialogue, his increasing love for Mandetta." (1861)
• Hand and Soul (1849)
• Hero's Lamp (1875)
• Introductory Sonnet ("A Sonnet is a moment's monument"; 1880)
• Joan of Arc [1879 (unfinished), 1863, 1882]
• La Bella Mano (for a picture; 1875)
• La Pia. Dante (1868–1880)
• Lisa ed Elviro (1843)
• Love's Greeting (1850, 1861, 1864)
• Mary's Girlhood [for a picture; 1848 (sonnet I), 1849 (sonnet II)]
• Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee (for a drawing; 1853–1859; 1869)
• Michael Scott's Wooing (for a drawing; 1853, 1869–1871, 1875–1876)
• Mnemosyne (1880)
• Old and New Art [group of 3 poems; 1849 (text); 1857 (picture, circa)]
• On William Morris (1871 September)
• Pandora (for a picture; 1869; 1868–1871)
• Parody on "Uncle Ned" (1852)
• Parted Love! [1869 September – 1869 November (circa)]
• The Passover in the Holy Family (for a drawing; 1849–1856; 1869 September)
• Perlascura. Twelve Coins for One Queen (1878)
• The Portrait (1869)
• Proserpine (1872; 1871–1882)
• The Question (for a design; 1875, 1882)
• "Retro me, Sathana!" (1847, 1848)
• The Return of Tibullus to Delia (1853–1855, 1867)
• A Sea-Spell (for a Picture; 1870, 1877)
• The Seed of David (for a picture; 1864)
• Silence. For a Design (1870, 1877)
• Sister Helen [1851–1852; 1870 (circa)]
• Sorrentino (1843)
• Soul's Beauty (1866; 1864–1870)
• St. Agnes of Intercession (1850; 1860)
• Troy Town (1863–1864; 1869–1870)
• Venus Verticordia (for a picture; 1868 January 16; 1863–1869)
• William and Marie. A Ballad (1841)[66]