Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante and Mediaevalism

For many years, Rossetti had worked on translations of Italian poetry, including Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova (published as The Early Italian Poets in 1861). These, along with Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, inspired his art of the 1850s. Rossetti created a method of painting in watercolours, using thick pigments mixed with gum to give rich effects similar to mediaeval illuminations. 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 friend William Allingham, and he contributed two illustrations to Edward Moxon's 1857 edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Poems and illustrations for works by his sister Christina Rossetti.

His visions of Arthurian romance and mediaeval design also inspired William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Neither Burne-Jones nor Morris knew Rossetti, but they were much influenced by his works, and met him by recruiting him as a contributor to their Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which Morris founded in 1856 to promote his ideas about art and poetry.

In February 1857, Rossetti wrote to William Bell Scott:

Two young men, projectors of the Oxford 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 perhaps Albert Dürer's finest works.

That summer Morris and Rossetti visited Oxford and, finding the Oxford Union debating-hall under construction, pursued a commission to paint the upper walls with scenes from Le Morte d'Arthur and to decorate the roof between the open timbers. Seven artists were recruited, among them Valentine Prinsep and Arthur Hughes, and the work was hastily begun. The frescoes, done too soon and too fast, began to fade at once and now are barely decipherable. Rossetti recruited two sisters, Bessie and Jane Burden, as models for the Oxford Union murals, and Jane became Morris's wife in 1859.

Rossetti's incomplete picture Found, begun in 1853 and still 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.

Book arts

Literature was integrated into the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's artistic practice from the beginning, with many paintings making direct literary references. Rossetti was particularly critical of the gaudy ornamentation of Victorian gift books and sought to refine bindings and illustrations to align with the principles of the Aesthetic Movement. Rossetti's key bindings were designed between 1861 and 1871. He collaborated as a designer/illustrator with his sister, the poet Christina Rossetti, on the first edition of Goblin Market (1862) and The Prince's Progress (1866).

One of Rossetti's contributions to illustration was the collaborative book, Poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (published by Edward Moxon in 1857 and known colloquially as the 'Moxon Tennyson'). Moxon envisioned Royal Academicians as the illustrators, but this vision was quickly disrupted once Millais, a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, became involved. Millais recruited William 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." 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.

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 wrote in 1855 a letter to poet William Allingham, in reference to his work on the Moxon Tennyson:I have not begun even designing for them yet, but fancy I shall try the Vision of Sin, and Palace 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.

A new direction

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 European Symbolist movement. These new works were based not on mediaevalism, but on the Italian High Renaissance artists of Venice, Titian and Veronese.

In 1861, Rossetti became a founding partner in the decorative arts firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with Morris, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, Philip Webb, Charles Faulkner and Peter Paul Marshall. Rossetti contributed designs for stained glass and other decorative objects.

Cheyne Walk years

After the death of his wife, Rossetti leased a Tudor House at 16, Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea, where he lived for 20 years, surrounded by extravagant furnishings and a parade of exotic birds and animals. Rossetti was fascinated with wombats, asking friends to meet him at the "Wombat's Lair" at the London Zoo in Regent'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 a llama and a toucan, which he dressed in a cowboy hat and trained to ride the llama round the dining table for his amusement.

During this period, Rossetti maintained Fanny Cornforth (described by William Allington as Rossetti's "housekeeper") in her own establishment nearby in Chelsea, and painted many voluptuous images of her between 1863 and 1865.

In 1865, he discovered auburn-haired Alexa Wilding, a dressmaker and would-be actress who was engaged to model for him on a full-time basis and sat for Veronica Veronese, The Blessed Damozel, A Sea–Spell, and other paintings. 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 Wilding one evening in the Strand 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. They shared a lasting bond; after Rossetti's death, Wilding travelled regularly to place a wreath on his grave.

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". Jane Morris was also photographed by John Robert Parsons, whose photographs were painted by Rossetti. In 1869, Morris and Rossetti rented a country house, Kelmscott Manor at Kelmscott, Oxfordshire, as a summer home, but it became a retreat for Rossetti and Jane Morris. They spent summers there with the Morrises' children, while William Morris travelled to Iceland in 1871 and 1873.

During these years, Rossetti was prevailed upon by friends, in particular Charles Augustus Howell, to exhume his poems from his wife's grave. In 1869 he did so, collating and publishing them in 1870 in the volume Poems by D. G. Rossetti. The collection included some translations, such as his "Ballad Of Dead Ladies", an 1869 translation of François Villon's poem "Ballade des dames du temps jadis". (The word "yesteryear" is credited to Rossetti as a neologism used for the first time in this translation.)

Rossetti's first collection of poetry was met with a savage reaction from critics. In an article in The Contemporary Review for October 1871, poet and critic Robert Buchanan attacked both the poems and Rossetti's morality. Against the advice of his brother William Michael, Rossetti issued a written reply in December, resulting in an extended essay from Buchanan, published as a 100-page pamphlet in May 1872, entitled: The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day.

Relationship with Elizabeth Siddal

In 1849 or 1850, Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal, who had entered the Pre-Raphaelite circle after being noticed by Walter Deverell while working in a milliner's in Leicester Square. Over the next decade, Siddall became Rossetti's muse and pupil, and after 1851, modelled exclusively for him. The couple were married in 1860 after a long engagement, during which Rossetti was serially unfaithful, and Siddal became addicted to laudanum.

In 1862, Siddall died of an overdose of laudanum, shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child. After her death Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and when Elizabeth was buried at Highgate Cemetery, he interred the bulk of his unpublished poems with her, though he later had them dug up. He idealised her image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as Beata Beatrix.