Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the English poet, illustrator and painter, founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. Some of his painted works include Proserpine 1874, The Day Dream and Pia de Tolomei, all of which depict the likeness of Jane Burden, the wife of William Morris.
He was born in London in the town of London. He was born in 1828 and lived to be 54.
He was well known for: Peot Illustration Painting
The son of émigré Italian scholar Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti and his wife Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti was born in London, on 12 May 1828. His family and friends called him Gabriel, but in publications he put the name Dante first in honour of Dante Alighieri. He was the brother of poet Christina Rossetti, critic William Michael Rossetti, and author Maria Francesca Rossetti. His father was a Roman Catholic, at least prior to his marriage, and his mother was an Anglican ostensibly Gabriel was baptised as and was a practising Anglican. During his childhood, Rossetti was home educated and later attended Kings College School, and often read the Bible, along with the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and Lord Byron.
The youthful Rossetti is described as self-possessed, articulate, passionate and charismatic but also ardent, poetic and feckless. Like all his siblings, he aspired to be a poet and attended Kings College School, in its original location near the Strand in London. He also wished to be a painter, having shown a great interest in Medieval Italian art. He studied at Henry Sass Drawing Academy from 1841 to 1845, when he enrolled in the Antique School of the Royal Academy, which he left in 1848. After leaving the Royal Academy, Rossetti studied under Ford Madox Brown, with whom he retained a close relationship throughout his life.
Following the exhibition of William Holman Hunts painting The Eve of St. Agnes, Rossetti sought out Hunts friendship. The painting illustrated a poem by the little-known John Keats. Rossettis own poem, The Blessed Damozel, was an imitation of Keats, and he believed Hunt might share his artistic and literary ideals. Together they developed the philosophy of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which they founded along with John Everett Millais.
The groups intention was to reform English art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach first adopted by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphaeland Michelangelo and the formal training regime introduced by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Their approach was to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art. The eminent critic John Ruskin wrote:
For the first issue of the brotherhoods magazine, The Germ, published early in 1850, Rossetti contributed a poem, The Blessed Damozel, and a story about a fictional early Italian artist inspired by a vision of a woman who bids him combine the human and the divine in his ar Rossetti was always more interested in the medieval than in the modern side of the movement, working on translations of Dante and other medieval Italian poets, and adopting the stylistic characteristics of the early Italians.
Rossettis 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 Scottsaw Girlhood in progress in Hunts studio and remarked on young Rossettis technique:
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.
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. Rossettis 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,
For many years, Rossetti worked on English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieris La Vita Nuova (published as The Early Italian Poets in 1861). These and Sir Thomas Malorys Le Morte dArthur 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 Moxons 1857 edition of Alfred, Lord Tennysons Poems and illustrations for works by his sister Christina Rossetti.
His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. 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 Magazinewhich Morris founded in 1856 to promote his ideas about art and poetry.
In February 1857, Rossetti wrote to William Bell Scott:
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 dArthurand to decorate the roof between the open timbers. Seven artists were recruited, among them Valentine Prinsep and Arthur Hughes, 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 Morriss wife in 1859.