Rossetti's art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism. His early poetry was influenced byJohn Keats andWilliam Blake. His later poetry was characterised by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequenceThe House of Life. Poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossetti's work. He frequently wrotesonnets to accompany his pictures, spanning fromThe Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) andAstarte Syriaca (1877), while also creating art to illustrate poems such asGoblin Market by the poetChristina Rossetti, his sister.
Rossetti's personal life was closely linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and musesElizabeth Siddal (whom he married),Fanny Cornforth, andJane Morris.
The youthful Rossetti is described as "self-possessed, articulate, passionate and charismatic"[5] but also "ardent, poetic and feckless".[6] Like all his siblings, he aspired to be a poet and attendedKing's College School, in its original location near theStrand in London. He also wished to be a painter, having shown a great interest inMedievalItalian art. He studied atHenry Sass' Drawing Academy from 1841 to 1845, when he enrolled in the Antique School of theRoyal Academy, which he left in 1848. After leaving the Royal Academy, Rossetti studied underFord Madox Brown, with whom he retained a close relationship throughout his life.[7]
Following the exhibition ofWilliam Holman Hunt's paintingThe Eve of St. Agnes, Rossetti sought out Hunt's friendship. The painting illustrated a poem byJohn 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 thePre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which they founded along withJohn Everett Millais.
The group's intention was to reform English art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach first adopted by theMannerist artists who succeededRaphael andMichelangelo and the formal training regime introduced by SirJoshua Reynolds. Their approach was to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions ofQuattrocento Italian and Flemish art.[8][9] The eminent criticJohn Ruskin wrote:
Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape background is painted to the last touch, in the open air, from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite figure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait of some living person.[10]
For the first issue of the brotherhood's 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 art.[11] Rossetti was always more interested in the medieval than in the modern side of the movement, working on translations ofDante and other medieval Italian poets, and adopting the stylistic characteristics of the early Italians.
Rossetti's first major paintings in oil display the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. HisGirlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) andEcce Ancilla Domini (1850) portray Mary as a teenage girl.William Bell Scott sawGirlhood 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 [Rossetti and Hunt] 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 metElizabeth 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 pictureFound, 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 includingDante Alighieri'sLa Vita Nuova (published asThe Early Italian Poets in 1861). These andSir Thomas Malory'sLe 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 medievalilluminations. 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 friendWilliam Allingham, and he contributed two illustrations to Edward Moxon's 1857 edition ofAlfred, Lord Tennyson'sPoems and illustrations for works by his sisterChristina Rossetti.[16]
His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspiredWilliam Morris andEdward 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 theirOxford and Cambridge Magazine which Morris founded in 1856 to promote his ideas about art and poetry.[18][19]
Two young men, projectors of theOxford 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 perhapsAlbert Dürer's finest works.[18]
That summer Morris and Rossetti visited Oxford and finding theOxford Union debating-hall under construction, pursued a commission to paint the upper walls with scenes fromLe Morte d'Arthur and to decorate the roof between the open timbers. Seven artists were recruited, among themValentine Prinsep andArthur Hughes,[20] and the work was hastily begun. Thefrescoes, done too soon and too fast, began to fade at once and now are barely decipherable. Rossetti recruited two sisters, Bessie andJane Burden, as models for theOxford 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 fromJohn Keats'Isabella, or, the Pot of Basil (1818). Rossetti was particularly critical of the gaudy ornamentation of Victoriangift books and sought to refine bindings and illustrations to align with the principles of theAesthetic Movement.[22] Rossetti's key bindings were designed between 1861 and 1871.[23] He collaborated as a designer/illustrator with his sister, poetChristina Rossetti, on the first edition ofGoblin Market (1862) andThe Prince's Progress (1866).
Sir Galahad at the ruined Chapel, watercolour and bodycolour, 1857–1859
One of Rossetti's most prominent contributions to illustration was the collaborative book,Poems byAlfred, Lord Tennyson (published byEdward 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 recruitedWilliam 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 poetWilliam 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 theVision of Sin, andPalace 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).
England began to see a revival of religious beliefs and practices starting in 1833 and moving onward to about 1845.[27] TheOxford Movement, also known as the Tractarian Movement, had recently begun a push toward the restoration ofChristian traditions that had been lost in the Church of England.[citation needed] Rossetti and his family had been attendingChrist 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 theCatholic practice of placing flowers and candles by the altar. Rossetti and his family, along with two of his colleagues (one of which cofounded thePre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) had also attended St. Andrew's on Wells Street, aHigh 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 paintingThe 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 inAnglican 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."
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 EuropeanSymbolist movement.[34] In them, Rossetti's depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He portrayed his new loverFanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism, while 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 HighRenaissance artists ofVenice,Titian andVeronese.[34][35]
Rossetti's wife, Elizabeth, died of an overdose oflaudanum in 1862, possibly a suicide, shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child.[36][37] Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and when Elizabeth was buried atHighgate Cemetery, he interred the bulk of his unpublished poems with her, though he later had them dug up. He idealised her image asDante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such asBeata Beatrix.[38]
After the death of his wife, Rossetti leased a Tudor House at 16,Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea,[41] where he lived for 20 years surrounded by extravagant furnishings and a parade of exotic birds and animals.[42] Rossetti was fascinated withwombats, asking friends to meet him at the "Wombat's Lair" at theLondon Zoo inRegent'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 allama and atoucan, which he dressed in a cowboy hat and trained to ride the llama round the dining-table for his amusement.[43]
Rossetti maintainedFanny Cornforth (described delicately by William Allington as Rossetti's "housekeeper")[44] in her own establishment nearby in Chelsea, and painted many voluptuous images of her between 1863 and 1865.[45]
In 1865, he discovered auburn-hairedAlexa Wilding, a dressmaker and would-be actress who was engaged to model for him on a full-time basis and sat forVeronica Veronese,The Blessed Damozel,A Sea–Spell, and other paintings.[46][47] 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 theStrand 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.[48] They shared a lasting bond; after Rossetti's death Wilding was said to have travelled regularly to place a wreath on his grave.[49]
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".[46] Jane Morris was also photographed byJohn Robert Parsons, whose photographs were painted by Rossetti. In 1869, Morris and Rossetti rented a country house,Kelmscott Manor atKelmscott, 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 toIceland in 1871 and 1873.[50]
During these years, Rossetti was prevailed upon by friends, in particularCharles Augustus Howell, to exhume his poems from his wife's grave which he did, collating and publishing them in 1870 in the volumePoems 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'ssonnet sequenceThe 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 amosaic of intensely described fragments. It was Rossetti's most substantial literary achievement.
The 1870 collectionPoems included some translations, such as his "Ballad Of Dead Ladies", an 1869 translation ofFrançois Villon's poem "Ballade des dames du temps jadis".[51] (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 fromThe House of Life sequence.
The grave of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the churchyard of All Saints, Birchington-on-Sea
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 Morris at Kelmscott that September, he "spent his days in a haze of chloral and whisky".[52] The next summer he was much improved, and bothAlexa Wilding and Jane sat for him at Kelmscott, where he created a soulful series of dream-like portraits.[52] In 1874, Morris reorganised his decorative arts firm, cutting Rossetti out of the business, and the polite fiction that both men were in residence with Jane atKelmscott 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 hisdrug addiction tochloral 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,[53] where he had gone in a vain attempt to recover his health, which had been destroyed by chloral as his wife's had been destroyed bylaudanum. He died ofBright's disease, a disease of the kidneys from which he had been suffering for some time. He had been housebound for some years on account of paralysis of the legs, though his chloral addiction is believed to have been a means of alleviating pain from a botchedhydrocele removal. He had been suffering from alcohol psychosis for some time brought on by the excessive amounts of whisky he used to drown out the bitter taste of the chloral hydrate. He is buried in the churchyard of All Saints atBirchington-on-Sea, Kent, England.[54]
Tate Britain,Birmingham,Manchester,Salford Museum and Art Galleries andWightwick Manor National Trust, all contain large collections of Rossetti's work; Salford was bequeathed a number of works following the death ofL. S. Lowry in 1976. Lowry was president of the Newcastle-based 'Rossetti Society', which was founded in 1966.[55] Lowry's private collection of works was chiefly built around Rossetti's paintings and sketches of Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris, and notable pieces includedPandora, Proserpine and a drawing ofAnnie Miller.
In an interview withMervyn 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."[56] 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."[56]
The popularity, frequent reproduction, and general availability of Rossetti's later paintings of women have led to this association with "a morbid and languorous sensuality".[57] His small-scale early works and drawings are less well known, but it is in these that his originality, technical inventiveness, and significance in the movement away from Academic tradition can best be seen.[58] AsRoger Fry wrote in 1916, "Rossetti more than any other artist sinceBlake may be hailed as a forerunner of the new ideas" in English Art.[59]
The character of Dr. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) appears in an episode ofCheers as Dante Gabriel Rossetti for his Halloween costume. His wife Dr. Lilith Sternin-Crane appears as Rossetti's sister Christina. Their son Frederick is dressed as Spiderman.[61]
Gabriel Rossetti and other members of the Rossetti family are characters inTim Powers' 2012 novelHide Me Among the Graves, in which both the Rossettis' uncle John Polidori and Gabriel's wife Elizabeth act as hosts for vampiric beings, and whose influence inspires the artistic genius of the family.
In 1904Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) created his song cycleThe House of Life from six poems by Rossetti. One song in that cycle, "Silent Noon", is one of Vaughan Williams's best known and most frequently performed songs.
In 1904,Phoebe Anna Traquair paintedThe Awakening, inspired by a sonnet from Rossetti'sThe House of Life.[62]
There is evidence to suggest that a number of paintings by Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) were influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Rossetti.[63]
The 1990s grunge bandHole used lines from Rossetti's "Superscription", fromHouse of Life, in their song "Celebrity Skin" from their albumCelebrity Skin: while Rossetti's line read "Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been" the Hole lyric is "Look at my face; my name is Might-have-been."
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
^abJanzen Kooistra, Lorraine (2011).Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture 1855–1875. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. p. 43.
^Housman, Laurence (1896).Arthur Boyd Houghton: A Selection from his Work in Black and White. London, England: Trubner and Co. p. 13.
^Welland, Dennis (1953).The Pre-Raphaelites in Literature and Art. London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd. p. 17.
^Orpwood, Pat (May 2004)."The Rossetti Bungalow".Birchington Heritage Trust - Newsletter. Birchington Heritage Trust. Retrieved7 July 2023.
^Wilson, Scott.Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Location 40729). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.
^Rebecca Jelbert: "Paula Modersohn-Becker’s self-portraits and the influence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti."The Burlington Magazine, vol.159, no.1373 (2017): 617-22.
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