Dante Gabriel Rossetti
May 12, 1828 - April 9, 1882
Founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
An Englishman with an Italian name, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born in London in 1828. His father, Gabriel, was a Dante scholar and Italian political exile. His mother, Frances Polidari Rossetti, was an Anglo-Italian whose grandfather had been the poet Byron's doctor.
Dante Gabriel was the second of four Rossetti children. His older sister, Maria, wrote about Dante and was an Anglican Nun; his younger sister, Christina, was a well-regarded poet in her own right; and the youngest, William Michael, who always remained close to his brother, was also an original member of the P.R.B. The Rossetti family , by all accounts, was close-knit and talented.
By the age of five, Rossetti was already writing plays about chivalry. At 12 he wrote his first poem "Roderick and Rosalba" which also had a chivalric theme. At 14 his "Sir Hugh the Heron" was written in imitation of Walter Scott. It was at this age that Rossetti enrolled in Sass's drawing academy which was considered preparation for entering one of the Royal Academy art schools.
In 1844 Rossetti first saw and greatly admired the work of the painter Ford Madox Brown. The following year Rossetti was admitted to the Antique School of the Royal Academy. Three years later, Rossetti left the academy for good and sought out Brown as a painting tutor.
1848 was an important year in the young Rossetti's life. In addition to leaving art school, tutoring with Brown, he sought out the young painter, William Holman Hunt, whose work "Eve of St. Agnes" Rossetti had seen at the 1848 Academy exhibition. Under Hunt's watchful eye, Rossetti began painting "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin".
Like Rossetti, Hunt was disenchanted with the neoclassical painting convention embedded in the Royal Academy's curriculum. Soon Rossetti and Hunt met John Millais, a precocious and talented art student, who was similarly disenchanted. In October 1848 while looking at engravings made of the frescoes in Campo Porto in Pisa, Italy, this restless group of young artists and several others including Rossetti's brother William, formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
1850 was also an important year in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's life. The P.R.B. began to attract attention as several examples of the style appeared in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1850. The P.R.B.'s official journal, The Germ, began publication in January (and ended four issues later in April). And, perhaps, most importantly, Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal. Rossetti would spend the next ten years obsessed with this women who he continuously paints, draws, sketches and writes poetry about.
During the mid-1850s the original configuration of the Brotherhood changed. Rossetti will meet William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and Charles Algernon Swinburne, all younger men who are inspired by Rossetti and his Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics. With the older Rossetti as leader, this younger group will usher in the second Pre-Raphaelite phase.
In 1860 Rossetti and Siddal are married. Two years later, Siddal dies. Grieving and guilty, Rossetti will bury his poetry manuscripts in her grave.
After his wife's death in 1862, Rossetti wrote little poetry, but he continued to work on his painting, primarily using oils, which he had earlier given up for watercolors. His reputation grew and he began a romantic relationship with Fanny Cornforth, one of his models. He was also, apparently, romantically involved with Jane Burden Morris, William Morris' wife.
In 1869, Rossetti's friend William Bell Scott convinced him to recover the poetry that had been buried in his wife's grave. The following year he published Poems which sparked the famous critique of the Pre-Raphaelites by Robert Buchanan called "The Fleshly School of Poetry." Many of the poems in this collection are focused on either Rossetti's dead wife or Jane Morris who he remained deeply attracted to.
It is also at this time in the early 1870s that Rossetti begins using the drug chloral to help him battle against his chronic insomnia. Rossetti begins a descent into mental illness characterized by eccentric, and at times manic and delusional behavior. Nevertheless, he continues to write and paint. In 1881 he published Ballads and Sonnets and a new revised edition of Poems. Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel's brother refers to this period between 1874 and 1882 as the "chloralized years."
Rossetti died a month before his 54th birthday in a friend's house near Birchington-on-sea.
