Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882), generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti ( ; ), was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Rossetti inspired many contemporary artists and writers, such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones. His later work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement.
Rossetti's art was characterised by its sensuality and its mediaeval revivalism. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats and William Blake. He frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, spanning from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) to Astarte Syriaca (1877), while also creating art to illustrate poems such as Goblin Market by his sister Christina Rossetti.
From about 1860, Rossetti's painting style changed to a dense, rich style drawing from later Italian Renaissance painting, very often showing a single female figure using one of his small group of regular models, typically with a luxuriant background of vegetation. He also produced many drawings, prints, and book illustrations.
Rossetti's personal life was closely linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and muses, including Elizabeth Siddal (whom he married), Fanny Cornforth, and Jane Morris.
Early life
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti was born on 12 May 1828, at 38 Charlotte Street (later renamed 105 Hallam Street) in London.Marsh (1999), p. 4.Packer, Lona Mosk (1963) Christina Rossetti University of California Press pp. 13–17Lindsay Duguid, "Rossetti, Christina Georgina" (1830–1894)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, Jan 2009 His father was the émigré Italian scholar Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti, and his mother was Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, the daughter of a Tuscan scholar of Greek descent, Gaetano Polidori. The writer and physician John William Polidori was Rossetti's maternal uncle.
Rossetti’s family and friends called him Gabriel, but in publications he favoured the name Dante. He had three siblings: the poet Christina Rossetti, the critic William Michael Rossetti, and the author Maria Francesca Rossetti.Treuherz et al. (2003), pp. 15–18. His father was a lapsed Roman Catholic and his mother was an Anglican: Gabriel was baptised as Anglican.
The household was a bohemian environment, with frequent visits by Italian artists, scholars, adventurers and revolutionaries, and the children, including Gabriel, were educated together at home by their mother, who was an important influence on all of them and taught them the works of Dante and Petrarch.
Rossetti went on to attend King's College School in its original location near the Strand in London. He read the Bible, along with the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and Lord Byron. In his teens he discovered the work of Dante Aligheri, whose Vita Nuova he later translated.
The youthful Rossetti is described as "self-possessed, articulate, passionate and charismatic"Treuherz et al. (2003), p. 19. but also "ardent, poetic and feckless".Hilton (1970), p. 26. Like all his siblings, he aspired to be a poet. 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.Treuherz et al. (2003), p. 15.
Following the exhibition of William Holman Hunt's painting The Eve of St. Agnes, Rossetti sought out Hunt's friendship. The painting illustrated a poem by John Keats. Rossetti's 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, a group they founded along with John Everett Millais.
The group's intention was to reform English art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach first adopted by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and 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.Treuherz et al. (2003), p. 22.Hilton (1970), pp. 31–35. Their technique involved the use of pure colours on a white background, and they also often painted outdoors for maximum authenticity.
The critic John Ruskin wrote:
For the first issue of the brotherhood's magazine, The Germ, published early in 1850, Rossetti contributed his 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 art.Marsh (1996), p. 21.
Career
Beginnings Rossetti's first major oil paintings 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:
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 rarely exhibited thereafter.
Dante and Mediaevalism For many years, Rossetti had worked on translations of Italian poetry, including Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova (published as The Early Italian Poets in 1861). These, along with Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, inspired his art of the 1850s. Rossetti created a method of painting in watercolours, using thick pigments mixed with gum to give rich effects similar to mediaeval 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.Treuherz et al. (2003), pp. 175–76.
His visions of Arthurian romance and mediaeval design also inspired William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.Treuherz et al. (2003), pp. 39–41. 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.
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 d'Arthur and to decorate the roof between the open timbers. Seven artists were recruited, among them Valentine Prinsep and Arthur Hughes,Watkinson, Ray, "Painting" in Parry (1996), p. 93. 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.Parry, William Morris, pp. 14–16.
Rossetti's incomplete picture Found, begun in 1853 and still 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.Treuherz et al. (2003), pp. 19, 24–25.
Book arts Literature was integrated into the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's artistic practice from the beginning, with many paintings making direct literary references. 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. Rossetti's key bindings were designed between 1861 and 1871. He collaborated as a designer/illustrator with his sister, the poet Christina Rossetti, on the first edition of Goblin Market (1862) and The Prince's Progress (1866).
One of Rossetti's 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, but this vision was quickly disrupted once Millais, a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, became involved. 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." 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.
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 wrote in 1855 a letter to poet William Allingham, 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.
Religious influence on works
England began to see a revival of religious beliefs and practices starting in 1833 and moving onward to about 1845. 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 whom cofounded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood), had also attended St. Andrew's on Wells Street, a High Anglican church.
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."
In spite of his unorthodox approach to religion, Rossetti's early work often deals with religious themes and imagery. The oil painting The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, finished in 1849, features an altar decorated very similarly to that of a Catholic altar. 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. 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."