Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti by George Frederic Watts
Born	12 May 1828(1828-05-12) London, England
Died	9 April 1882(1882-04-09) (aged 53) Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, England
Occupation	Poet, Illustrator, Painter

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882) was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 and was later to be the main inspiration for second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement. He was also a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement.

Rossetti's art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterised by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence The House of Life.

Rossetti's personal life was closely linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and muses Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris.

Early life

Self-portrait, 1847

The son of émigré Italian scholar Gabriel Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti and his wife Frances Polidori, D.G. Rossetti was born in London, England and originally named Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti. 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, the critic William Michael Rossetti, and author Maria Francesca Rossetti.

Like all his siblings, he aspired to be a poet and attended King's College School. However, he also wished to be a painter, having shown a great interest in Medieval Italian art. He studied at Henry Sass's Drawing Academy from 1841 to 1845 when he enrolled at the Antique School of the Royal Academy, leaving in 1848. After leaving the Royal Academy, Rossetti studied under Ford Madox Brown, with whom he was to retain a close relationship throughout his life.

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 the then still little-known John Keats. Rossetti's own poem "The Blessed Damozel" was an imitation of Keats, so he believed that 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. Rossetti was always more interested in the Medieval than in the modern side of the movement. He was publishing translations of Dante and other Medieval Italian poets, and his art also sought to adopt the stylistic characteristics of the early Italians.

In 1850, Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal, who became an important model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters. They were married in 1860.

Career

The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849)

Rossetti's first major paintings display some of the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. His Girlhood of Mary, Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini both portray Mary as an emaciated and repressed teenage girl. His incomplete picture Found 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. This was also true of his later poetry. Many of the ladies he portrayed have the image of idealized Botticelli's Venus, who was supposed to portray Simonetta Vespucci.

Although he won support from John Ruskin, criticism of his paintings caused Rossetti to withdraw from public exhibitions and turn to watercolours, which could be sold privately.

Beata Beatrix (1864-1870), Tate Britain (model: Elizabeth Siddal)

In 1861, Rossetti published The Early Italian Poets, a set of English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova. These, and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, inspired his art in the 1850s. His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired his new friends of this time, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Rossetti also typically wrote sonnets for his pictures, such as "Astarte Syriaca". As a designer, he worked with William Morris to produce images for stained glass and other decorative devices.

Both these developments were precipitated by events in his private life, in particular by the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal. She had taken an overdose of laudanum shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and upon the death of his beloved Elizabeth, buried the bulk of his published poems with her at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them dug back up. He idealised her image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as Beata Beatrix.

These paintings were to be a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement. In these works, Rossetti's depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He tended to portray his new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism, whilst another of his alleged mistresses Jane Burden, the wife of his business partner William Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess.

Cheyne Walk years

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

The Blessed Damozel (model: Alexa Wilding)

After the death of his wife in 1862, Rossetti leased Tudor House at number 16 Cheyne Walk, along the Thames in London, where he lived for the next twenty years surrounded by extravagant furnishings and a parade of exotic birds and animals.^[1] Rossetti was fascinated with wombats, frequently asking friends to meet him at the "Wombat's Lair" at the London Zoo in Regent's Park, and spending hours there himself. Finally, in September 1869, he was to acquire the first of two pet wombats. This short-lived wombat, named "Top", was often brought to the dinner table and allowed to sleep in the large centrepiece during meals. This fascination with exotic animals continued throughout Rossetti's life, finally culminating in the purchase of a llama and a Toucan which Rossetti would dress in a cowboy hat and persuade it to ride the llama round the dining table for his amusement.^[2]

Rossetti maintained Fanny Cornforth (described delicately by William Allington as Rossetti's "housekeeper")^[3] in her own establishment nearby in Chelsea, and painted many voluptuous images of her between 1863 and 1865.^[4] In 1865 he discovered auburn-haired Alex Wilding, a dressmaker and would-be actress who was engaged to model for him on a full-time basis and sat for The Blessed Damozel and other paintings of the period.^[5] Jane Morris, whom Rossetti had found as a model for the Oxford Union murals he painted with William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones in 1858, also sat for him during these years, and she soon "consumed and obessed him in paint, poetry, and life".^[5] In 1869, Morris and Rossetti rented a country house, Kelmscott Manor at Kelmscott, Oxfordshire, as a summer home, but it soon became a retreat for Rossetti and Jane Morris to have a long-lasting and complicated liaison. The two spent summers there, with the Morris children, while Morris himself traveled to Iceland in 1871 and 1873.^[6]

During these years, Rossetti was prevailed upon by friends, in particular Charles Augustus Howell, to exhume his poems from his wife's grave. This he did, collating and publishing them in 1870 in the volume Poems by D. G. Rossetti. They created a controversy when they were attacked as the epitome of the "fleshly school of poetry". The eroticism and sensuality of the poems caused offence. One poem, "Nuptial Sleep", described a couple falling asleep after sex. This 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 to reflect upon 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. This was Rossetti's most substantial literary achievement. In 1881, Rossetti published a second volume of poems, Ballads and Sonnets, which included the remaining sonnets from the The House of Life sequence.

Decline and death

Proserpine (1874) (model: Jane Morris)

The savage reaction of critics to Rossetti's first collection of poetry contributed to a mental breakdown in June, 1872, and although he joined Jane at Kelmscott that September, he "spent his days in a haze of chloral and whisky"^[7] The next summer he was much improved, and both Alexa Wilding and Jane Morris sat to him at Kelmscott, where he created a soulful series of dream-like portraits.^[8] In 1874, Morris reorganized his decorative arts firm, cutting Rossetti out of the business, and the polite fiction that both men were in residence at with Jane at Kelmscott could not be maintained. Rossetti abruptly left Kelmscott in July 1874 and never returned. Toward the end of his life, he sank into a morbid state, darkened by his drug addiction to chloral hydrate and increasing mental instability. He spent his last years as a recluse at Cheyne Walk.

On Easter Sunday, 1882, he died at the country house of a friend, where he had gone in yet another vain attempt to recover his health, which had been destroyed by chloral as his wife's had been destroyed by laudanum. He is buried at Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, England. His grave is visited regularly by admirers of his life's work and achievements and this can be seen by fresh flowers placed there regularly.

Collections

Birmingham, Manchester and Salford Museum and Art Galleries all contain large collections of Rossetti's work; the latter was bequeathed a number of works following the death of L.S. Lowry in 1976. Lowry was president of the Newcastle-based 'Rossetti Society', which was founded in 1966.^[9] Lowry's private collection of works was chiefly built around Rossetti's paintings and sketches of Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris, and notable pieces included Pandora, Proserpine and a drawing of Annie Miller. In an interview with Mervyn Levy, Lowry explained his fascination with the Rossetti women in relation to his own work: "I don't like his women at all, but they fascinate me, like a snake. That's why I always buy Rossetti whenever I can. His women are really rather horrible. It's like a friend of mine who says he hates my work, although it fascinates him."^[10] The friend Lowry referred to was businessman Monty Bloom, to whom he also explained his obsession with Rossetti's portraits: "They are not real women [...] They are dreams [...] He used them for something in his mind caused by the death of his wife. I may be quite wrong there, but significantly they all came after the death of his wife."^[11]

Media

Rossetti was played by Oliver Reed in Ken Russell's film Dante's Inferno (1967). The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as a whole have been the subjects of two BBC period dramas. The first, The Love School, was shown in 1975, starring Ben Kingsley as Rossetti. The second was Desperate Romantics, in which Rossetti is played by Aidan Turner. It was first broadcast on BBC 2 Tuesday, 21 July 2009.^[12]

Selected works

Paintings

Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850), Tate Britain, London	The Tune of the Seven Towers (1857), watercolour, Tate Britain	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	Found (1865-1869, unfinished), Delaware Art Museum
My Lady Greensleeves (1864)	Lady Lilith (1867), Metropolitan Museum of Art (model: Fanny Cornforth).	Lady Lilith (1868), Delware Art Museum (Fanny Cornforth, overpainted at Kelsmcott 1872-73 with the face of Alexa Wilding).[13]	Jane Morris (The Blue Silk Dress) (1868), oil on canvas, Kelmscott Manor
Pia de' Tolomei (1868-1880), Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence (model: Jane Morris)	A Vision of Fiammetta (1878), one of Rossetti's last paintings, now in the collection of Andrew Lloyd Webber (model: Marie Spartali Stillman)

Drawings

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

Woodcut illustrations

The Maids of Elphen-Mere, Rossetti's first published woodcut illustration (1855)

File: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)

Caricatures and sketches

Death of a Wombat (1869)

William Morris reading to Jane Morris while she takes the waters at Bad Ems (1869)

See also

• English art
• List of paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
• Rossetti and His Circle by Max Beerbohm
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti paintings
• Rossetti-Polidori family tree
• James Smetham

References

Bibliography

• Ash, Russell. (1995) Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Pavilion Books ISBN 978-1857934120; New York: H. N. Abrams ISBN 978-1857939507.
• Doughty, Oswald (1949) A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti London: Frederick Muller
• Fredeman, William E. (1971). Prelude to the last decade: Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the summer of 1872. Manchester [Eng.]: The John Rylands Library.
• Fredeman, William E. (Ed.) (2002-8) The correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 7 Vols. Brewer, Cambridge.
• McGann, J. J. (2000). Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the game that must be lost. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Rohde, Shelley, (2000) L.S. Lowry: A Biography; Lowry Press, Salford Quays
• Rossetti, D. G. The House Of Life
• Rossetti, D. G., & Marsh, J. (2000). Collected writings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Chicago: New Amsterdam Books.
• Simons, J. (2008). Rossetti's Wombat: Pre-Raphaelites and Australian animals in Victorian London. London: Middlesex University Press.
• Treuherz, J., Prettejohn, E., Becker, E., & Rossetti, D. G. (2003). Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London: Thames & Hudson.
• Todd, Pamela (2001). Pre-Raphaelites at Home, New York: Watson-Giptill Publications, ISBN 0823042855.

External links

• The Rossetti Archive
• Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery's Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource
• Website about Rossetti's wife, Elizabeth Siddal