Portal:Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Portal maintenance status: (October 2018)
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Introduction
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882), generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti (/rəˈzɛti/), was a British poet, illustrator, painter and translator, and a member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Rossetti was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. His 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 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. Poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossetti's work. He frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, spanning from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Astarte Syriaca (1877), while also creating art to illustrate poems such as Goblin Market by the celebrated poet Christina Rossetti, his sister.
Selected general articles
Christina Georgina Rossetti (5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894) was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. She is famous for writing "Goblin Market" and "Remember". She also wrote the words of two Christmas carols well known in the British Isles: "In the Bleak Midwinter", later set to music by Gustav Holst and by Harold Darke, and "Love Came Down at Christmas", also set by Harold Darke and other composers. Read more...
A Morris & Co. stained glass window to a design by Edward Burne-Jones installed in Malmesbury Abbey. The window shows characteristic themes based on Arthurian legends.
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (1861–1875) was a furnishings and decorative arts manufacturer and retailer founded by the artist and designer William Morris with friends from the Pre-Raphaelites. With its successor Morris & Co. (1875–1940) the firm's medieval-inspired aesthetic and respect for hand-craftsmanship and traditional textile arts had a profound influence on the decoration of churches and houses into the early 20th century.
Although its most influential period was during the flourishing of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the 1880s and 1890s, Morris & Co. remained in operation in a limited fashion from World War I until its closure in 1940. The firm's designs are still sold today under licences given to Sanderson and Sons part of the Walker Greenbank wallpaper and fabrics business (which owns the "Morris & Co." brand) and Liberty of London. Read more...
Proserpine (also Proserpina) is an oil painting on canvas by English artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painted in 1874 and currently housed at Tate Britain. Read more...- Dante's Inferno: The Private Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poet and Painter (1967) is a feature-length 35mm film directed by Ken Russell and first screened on the BBC on 22 December 1967 as part of Omnibus. It quickly became a staple in cinemas in retrospectives of Russell's work. It tells of the relationship between the 19th-century artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his model, Elizabeth Siddal. Read more...
Rossetti and His Circle is a book of twenty-three caricatures by English caricaturist, essayist and parodist Max Beerbohm. Published in 1922 by William Heinemann, the drawings were Beerbohm's humorous imaginings concerning the life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites, the period, as he put it, "just before oneself." The book is now considered one of Beerbohm's masterpieces. Read more...
Paolo and Francesca da Rimini is a watercolour by English artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painted in 1855 and currently housed at Tate Britain. Read more...
Bocca Baciata (1859) is a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti which represents a turning point in his career. It was the first of his pictures of single female figures, and established the style that was later to become a signature of his work. The model was Fanny Cornforth, the principal inspiration for Rossetti's sensuous figures.
The title, meaning "mouth that has been kissed", refers to the sexual experience of the subject and is taken from the Italian proverb written on the back of the painting:Bocca baciata non perde ventura, anzi rinnova come fa la luna.
‘The mouth that has been kissed does not lose its savour,
indeed it renews itself just as the moon does.’
Rossetti, an accomplished translator of early Italian literature, probably knew the proverb from Boccaccio’s Decameron where it is used as the culmination of the tale of Alatiel: a beautiful Saracen princess who, despite having had sex on perhaps ten thousand occasions with eight separate lovers in the space of four years, successfully presents herself to the King of the Algarve as his virgin bride. Read more...
Sir Tristram and la Belle Ysoude drink the potion, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1862, after a design by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Bradford Art Galleries and Museums.
The Tristram and Isoude stained glass panels are a series of 13 small stained-glass windows made in 1862 by Morris, Marshall, Faulker & Co. for Harden Grange, the house of textile merchant Walter Dunlop, near Bingley in Yorkshire, England. Depicting the legend of Tristan and Iseult, they were designed by six of the leading Pre-Raphaelite artists of the day, to an overall design by William Morris. They were acquired in 1917 by Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, which is now part of Bradford Museums & Galleries. They can be seen on display at Cliffe Castle, Keighley. Read more...
Monna Rosa is the title of two oil paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, both of Frances Leyland, the wife of shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland. The earlier and smaller painting was completed in 1862 and its whereabouts is now unknown. The second was completed in 1867 and is now in a private collection.
Frederick Leyland displayed the larger painting in his drawing room with five other Rossetti "stunners." Read more...
Illustration by Holman Hunt to Thomas Woolner's poem "My Beautiful Lady", published in The Germ, 1850
The Germ, thoughts towards nature in art and literature (1850) was a periodical established by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to disseminate their ideas. It was not a success, only surviving for four issues between January and April 1850. The Germ was renamed Art and Poetry, being Thoughts towards Nature, conducted principally by Artists for its last two issues. Read more...
Beata Beatrix is an oil on canvas painting by Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, completed in 1870. It depicts Beatrice Portinari from Dante Alighieri's poem La Vita Nuova at the moment of her death. The painting's title in English translates to 'Blessed Beatrice'. La Vita Nuova had been a story that Rossetti had found of interest from childhood and he had begun work translating it into English in 1845 and published it in his work, The Early Italian Poets.
Rossetti modeled Beatrice after his deceased wife and frequent model, Elizabeth Siddal, who died in 1862. The painting was created from the numerous drawings that Rossetti had made of Siddal during their time together. The symbolism in the painting of a red dove, a messenger of love, relates back to Rossetti's love for Siddal with the white poppy representing laudanum and the means of her death. Several of Siddal's friends found the painting to bear little resemblance to the drawings of her—the facial features were harder and the neck is out of proportion. Beata Beatrix is one of Rossetti's most recognized works and has made Siddal's name to be one that is frequently linked with Dante Alighieri's Beatrice. Read more...
Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, later Rossetti , of London (1800–1886) was a scholar, daughter, wife and mother of important writers and artists, she was the governess of her four children. She was also a model of the paintings of her son Dante. Some photographic portraits, by Lewis Carroll, in which he appears with his family in the Victorian era, are permanently displayed at National Portrait Gallery, London Read more...
Dante's Dream (full title Dante's Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice) is a painting from 1871 by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It hangs in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Merseyside, England.
Rossetti had a lifelong interest in the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. The painting was inspired by Dante's poem La Vita Nuova. In this poem Dante dreams that he is led to the death-bed of Beatrice Portinari, who was the object of his unfulfilled love. Dante, in black, stands looking towards the dying Beatrice who is lying on a bed. Two female figures in green hold a canopy over her. An angel in red holds Dante's hand and leans forward to kiss Beatrice. Read more...
Ecce Ancilla Domini (Latin: "Behold the handmaiden of the Lord"), or The Annunciation, is an oil painting by the English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, first painted in 1850 and now in Tate Britain in London. The Latin title is a quotation from the Vulgate text of the first chapter of the Gospel of Saint Luke, describing the Annunciation, where Mary accepts the message brought to her by the Angel Gabriel that she would give birth to a child (Jesus) by God. Read more...
Mnemosyne, also titled Lamp of Memory and Ricordanza, is an oil painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti begun in 1875 or early 1876 and completed in 1881. Jane Morris was the model, and Frederick Richards Leyland bought the painting in 1881 and displayed it in his drawing room with five other Rossetti "stunners." At about the same time Rossetti, a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was painting Astarte Syriaca, a larger painting completed in 1877 with Morris in a very similar pose. Read more...
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin is an 1849 oil on canvas painting by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, measuring 83.2 by 65.4 cm and now in the collection of Tate Britain, to which it was bequeathed in 1937 by Agnes Jekyll. It was his first completed oil painting and is signed "Dante Gabriele Rossetti P.R.B. 1849". He first exhibited it at the 'Free Exhibition' at the Hyde Park Corner Gallery. Read more...
Pia de' Tolomei is an oil painting on canvas by English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painted around 1868 and currently housed at the Spencer Museum of Art, on the campus of the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. Read more...
Lady Lilith is an oil painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti first painted in 1866–68 using his mistress Fanny Cornforth as the model, then altered in 1872–73 to show the face of Alexa Wilding. The subject is Lilith, who was, according to ancient Judaic myth, "the first wife of Adam" and is associated with the seduction of men and the murder of children. She is shown as a "powerful and evil temptress" and as "an iconic, Amazon-like female with long, flowing hair."
Rossetti overpainted Cornforth's face, perhaps at the suggestion of his client, shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland, who displayed the painting in his drawing room with five other Rossetti "stunners." After Leyland's death, the painting was purchased by Samuel Bancroft and Bancroft's estate donated it in 1935 to the Delaware Art Museum where it is now displayed. Read more...
A Sea–Spell is an 1877 oil painting and accompanying 1869 sonnet by English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, depicting a siren playing an instrument to lure sailors. It is currently on display in the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Read more...- The Love School (broadcast in the U.S. as The Brotherhood) is a BBC television drama series originally broadcast in 1975 about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, written by John Hale, Ray Lawler, Robin Chapman and John Prebble. It was directed by Piers Haggard, John Glenister and Robert Knights. It was shown during January and February 1975. It includes six episodes, each episode is 75 minutes in length.
The drama was a significant influence on the subsequent 2009 series Desperate Romantics. It was also the basis of the historical novel of the same name by Hale. It appears never to have been released on DVD anywhere in the world despite fans calling for such a release on IMDB and elsewhere. Read more...
La Ghirlandata ("The Garlanded Woman") is an 1873 painting by English painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is currently in the collection of the Guildhall Art Gallery in London, United Kingdom. The model who sat for the painting was Alexa Wilding. Read more...
Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (25 July 1829 – 11 February 1862), styled and commonly known as Elizabeth Siddal, was an English artist, poet, and artists' model. Siddall was an important and influential artist and poet. Significant collections of her artworks can be found at Wightwick Manor and the Ashmolean. Siddall was painted and drawn extensively by artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Walter Deverell, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais (including his notable 1852 painting Ophelia) and her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Read more...
The Great Bookcase is a large piece of painted furniture designed by the English architect and designer William Burges. The bookcase is 10 feet (3.0 m) high and 5 feet (1.5 m) wide. It has been described as "the most important example of Victorian painted furniture ever made."
The paintings on the bookcase depict Pagan and Christian art depicted in "allegories of poetry, architecture, sculpture, painting and music". Believed to have been constructed by the firm of Thomas Sneddon, it was designed in 1859 and finished in 1862. Christian themes are painted on the left side of the bookcase, and Pagan themes on the right, decorated by fourteen Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian artists Read more...
Found is an unfinished oil painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, now in the Delaware Art Museum. The painting is Rossetti's only treatment in oil of a contemporary moral subject, urban prostitution, and although the work remained incomplete at Rossetti's death in 1882, he always considered it one of his most important works, returning to it many times from the mid-1850s until the year before his death. Read more...
The Day Dream or, as it was initially intended to be named, Monna Primavera, is an oil on canvas painting by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founder Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The work, which measures 158.7 centimetres (62.5 in) in height by 92.7 centimetres (36.5 in) wide, was undertaken in 1880 and depicts Jane Morris posed in a seated position on the bough of a sycamore tree. A small stem of honeysuckle is in her hand, a token of love in the Victorian era, that may be an indication of the secret affair the artist was immersed in with her at the time. The artwork was left to the Victoria and Albert Museum by Constantine Alexander Ionides in 1900. Read more...
The Beloved (also The Bride) is an oil painting on canvas by English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, first painted in 1865 and currently housed at Tate Britain. Read more...- This is a list of paintings by the British Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Most painting details are referenced from the Rossetti Archive,
with some additional paintings researched from The Walker Art Gallery. Read more...
The Hogarth Club was an exhibition society of artists, based at 84 Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia, London, UK, which existed between 1858 and 1861. It was founded by former members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood after the original PRB had been dissolved. It was envisaged that the club would provide an alternative meeting space and exhibition venue to overcome prejudice against the Pre-Raphaelites at the Royal Academy. Unlike the PRB, the Hogarth Club was established on a professional basis, with two classes of members, artistic and non-artistic, and a distinction between London-based "resident" and provincial "non-resident" members.
Ford Madox Brown suggested that the club be named after William Hogarth since Hogarth was "a painter whom he deeply reverenced as the originator of moral invention and drama in modern art". Brown and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had worked on some previous independent exhibitions, but became determined to form a permanent exhibition space after the rejection of Pre-Raphaelite work by the Academy in 1857. In response they created their own exhibition, later founding the Hogarth Club in tandem with other sympathetic artists, most notably William Holman Hunt and John Roddam Spencer Stanhope. Read more...- Desperate Romantics is a six-part television drama serial about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, first broadcast on BBC Two between 21 July and 25 August 2009.
The series somewhat fictionalized the lives and events depicted. Though heavily trailed, the series received mixed reviews and dwindling audiences. Read more...
"The Blessed Damozel" is perhaps the best known poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti as well as the title of some of his best known paintings. The poem was first published in 1850 in the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ. Rossetti subsequently revised the poem twice and republished it in 1856, 1870 and 1873.
The poem was partially inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven", with its depiction of a lover grieving on Earth over the death of his loved one. Rossetti chose to represent the situation in reverse. The poem describes the damozel observing her lover from heaven, and her unfulfilled yearning for their reunion in heaven. Read more...
Monna Vanna is an 1866 oil on canvas painting (88.9 × 86.4 cm) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was acquired by the collector William Henry Blackmore and later entered the collection of George Rae, one of Rossetti's patrons. It later passed from Rae to the joint ownership of Arthur Du Cros and Otto Beit and it was purchased from them by the Tate Gallery in 1916 via the NACF – it is now in the collection of Tate Britain in London.
It shows a frontal half-length portrait of Rossetti's main model Alexa Wilding, with her head turned to the right of the frame. She is shown with pale, luminous and delicate skin (fitting in with the aestheticism of the time) and a hard penetrating gaze. She wears a feather mantle or strip over one shoulder as well as many kinds of jewellery, picked by the painter to show off his painterly skill – a red coral necklace, rings and earrings. In her hair are two spiral shell-shaped hairclips, accessories particularly loved by Rossetti and used here to emphasize the painting's circular composition. Rossetti's own opinion of the painting was that it was "probably the most effective as a room decoration that I have ever painted". Read more...
Gaetano Fedele Polidori (1763–1853) was an Italian writer and scholar living in London. He was the son of Agostino Ansano Polidori (1714–78), a physician and poet who lived and practised in his native Bientina, near Pisa, Tuscany.
Polidori studied law at the University of Pisa. He became secretary to the tragedian Vittorio Alfieri in 1785 and remained with him four years. Read more...
Water Willow is an 1871 oil painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It depicts Jane Morris in the river landscape near Kelmscott Manor, with the manor in the left background and Kelmscott Church below the hill to the right. Read more...
The Oxford Union murals (1857–1859) are a series of mural decorations in the Oxford Union library building. The series was executed by a team of Pre-Raphaelite artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. The paintings depict scenes from Arthurian myth.
The murals were commissioned by John Ruskin and the subject was probably chosen as a result of earlier Pre-Raphaelite interest in Arthurian themes, such as the illustrations to Edward Moxon's 1857 edition of Tennyson. In addition to Rossetti, Morris and Burne-Jones, several other artists agreed to contribute. These were the painters Val Prinsep, Arthur Hughes, J. H. Pollen, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope and the sculptor Alexander Munro. Read more...
Maria Francesca Rossetti (17 February 1827 – 24 November 1876) was an English author and nun. She was the sister of artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti as well as William Michael Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti, who dedicated her 1862 poem Goblin Market to Maria. She was born in London. Read more...
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (later known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The three founders were joined by William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner to form the seven-member "brotherhood". Their principles were shared by other artists, including Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes and Marie Spartali Stillman.
A later, medievalising strain inspired by Rossetti included Edward Burne-Jones and extended into the twentieth century with artists such as John William Waterhouse. Read more...
Veronica Veronese is an oil painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted in 1872 with Alexa Wilding as the model. The painting was conceived as a companion to Lady Lilith. Rossetti sold the painting to one of his best clients, shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland. In 1923 it was acquired by the estate of Samuel Bancroft which donated it in 1935 to the Delaware Art Museum. Read more...
William Michael Rossetti, by Julia Margaret Cameron
William Michael Rossetti (25 September 1829 – 5 February 1919) was an English writer and critic. Read more...
Did you know...
- ... that when Debussy wrote his cantata La Damoiselle élue, setting a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he had probably not seen the poet's painting of the subject?
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Selected images
The Day Dream (1880). The sitter is Jane Morris.
Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850), Tate Britain, London
Portrait of Dante Gabriel Rossetti at 22 years of Age by William Holman Hunt
A Vision of Fiammetta (1878), one of Rossetti's last paintings, now in the collection of Andrew Lloyd Webber (model: Marie Spartali Stillman)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti by George Wylie Hutchinson
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849). The models were the artist's mother for St. Anne and his sister Christina for the Virgin.
Pia de' Tolomei (1868–1880), Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence (model: Jane Morris)
His home at 16 Cheyne Walk, London
The Blessed Damozel (1871–1878; model: Alexa Wilding)
Found (1865–1869, unfinished), Delaware Art Museum
Lady Lilith (1868), Delaware Art Museum (Fanny Cornforth, overpainted at Kelsmcott 1872–73 with the face of Alexa Wilding)
Jane Morris (The Blue Silk Dress) (1868), Kelmscott Manor
Rossetti reading proofs of Ballads and Sonnets at 16 Cheyne Walk, by Henry Treffry Dunn (1882)
Proserpine (1874; model: Jane Morris)
Alexa Wilding (1879)
Bocca Baciata (1859) signalled a new direction on Rossetti's work. (Model: Fanny Cornforth)
Lady Lilith (1867), Metropolitan Museum of Art (model: Fanny Cornforth)
The Roman Widow (1874), Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico
Original manuscript of Autumn Song by Rossetti, 1848, Ashley Library
Beata Beatrix (1864–1870), Tate Britain (model: Elizabeth Siddal)
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