Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828–1882)

A photograph of the English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti with his mother and sisters, taken by Lewis Carroll in their garden at Cheyne Walk, 1863. All the children of the family became famous in the arts: Christina (far left) was a poet, Maria was a writer, Dante Gabriel was a painter and poet, and William (not pictured) was a literary critic. Of the four, Dante Gabriel and Christina are the best known.

English painter and poet. He was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) in 1848. As well as romantic medieval scenes, he produced many idealized portraits of women, including the Beata Beatrix (1864). His verse includes ‘The Blessed Damozel’ (1850). His sister was the poet Christina Rossetti.

He formed the PRB with the painters John Everett Millais and Holman Hunt but produced only two deliberately Pre-Raphaelite pictures, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850), both in the Tate Gallery, London. Afterwards he refused to exhibit, and developed a broader style and a personal subject matter, related to his poetry. He was a friend of the critic John Ruskin, who helped establish his reputation as a painter, and of William Morris and his wife Jane, who became Rossetti's lover and the subject of much of his work. From 1857 to 1858 he worked on the Arthurian frescoes for the Oxford Union with Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, and initiated a second phase of Pre-Raphaelitism associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement.

His Poems (1870) were recovered from the grave of his wife Elizabeth Siddal (1834–1862), also a painter, whom he had married in 1860, and were attacked as being of ‘the fleshly school of poetry’.

Rossetti was born in London, the son of an exiled Italian. He studied drawing under Cary and at the Royal Academy schools. He was as much attracted to literature as to art, translating Dante (starting 1845) and in 1847 he wrote his poem ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and several of his best sonnets. ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and his prose story ‘Hand and Soul’ appeared in the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ (1850), which was edited by his brother William.

He was briefly a pupil of Ford Madox Brown before forming the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Between 1850 and 1860 he produced many of his best pictures, mainly in watercolour, his subjects almost all from Dante or the Morte D'Arthur; his chief model was Elizabeth Siddal.

In his later painting he concentrated on single studies of allegorical females: Proserpine (Tate Gallery, London), Astarte Syriaca (Manchester City Art Gallery), and The Day Dream (Victoria and Albert Museum, London), his most important model being William Morris's wife, Jane.

Rosetti's wife, Elizabeth Siddal, died within two years of their marriage. In his grief Rossetti buried his manuscript poems in her coffin, but yielding to the pleas of friends, he sanctioned their disinterment in 1869, and these and others were published the following year. After this he became addicted to the use of chloral which affected both his mind and body, though he continued to paint. He attempted suicide in 1872 and suffered from partial paralysis from 1881.

His poetical works were collected in 1886, and his letters, with a memoir by his brother William, were published in 1895.