Who Was Dante Gabriel Rossetti?
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (born Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, 1828-1882) was a British poet, painter, illustrator, and translator, and a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Rossetti was born in London on May 12, 1828, the eldest son of Italian political exile Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti (a professor of Italian at King's College London and a Dante scholar) and Frances Polidori. Rossetti founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, along with painters James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens, the sculptor Thomas Woolner, and his brother William Michael Rossetti (the art critic). Rossetti's painting and poetry combined deeply symbolic medieval and Italian Renaissance subject matter with intense emotional and aesthetic content, and his work was central to the broader Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic, and Arts and Crafts movements through the nineteenth century.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painted by William Holman Hunt, 1853. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
This guide covers who Dante Gabriel Rossetti was, his early life and family, his role in founding the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, his most famous paintings and poems, his relationships with Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris, his later career, and his lasting influence on British art and literature.
Who was Dante Gabriel Rossetti?
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet and painter born in London in 1828, who became one of the most influential British artists of the nineteenth century. He helped start the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (founded in 1848), and by the 1860s and 1870s Rossetti was a major figure in the Aesthetic Movement. He also linked the Pre-Raphaelite generation to the broader Arts and Crafts circle around William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones (a circle he ended up deep inside, as you'll see).
The name came later. He was christened Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, son of Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian poet and Dante scholar exiled in London, and a half-English mother. Rossetti moved "Dante" to the front and went by "Dante Gabriel." That tells you plenty. Dante Alighieri was the poet he kept coming back to for the rest of his life, in paint and in verse.
It was a clever house. Christina became a major Victorian poet (she wrote "Goblin Market," among many other significant works). William Michael grew into an art critic and editor and served as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's secretary and historian. Maria Francesca was a scholar of Dante and Italian literature. All four Rossetti children count among the most important Italian-English cultural figures of the Victorian period, quite a record for one London household.
Rossetti never chose between his two arts, and he painted and wrote side by side his whole career. On canvas that meant intense color and dense symbolism, usually gathered around a beautiful woman out of Italian Renaissance or medieval subject matter. On the page there's "The House of Life," his sonnet sequence, and a long run of shorter poems on love and art (and, quite often, death).
The end was slow. From around 1870, years after his wife Elizabeth Siddal died in 1862, chloral (a sedative) was his way of managing insomnia and depression, and the addiction wore him down. He died on April 9, 1882, at the seaside town of Birchington-on-Sea in Kent, England, and his death is usually put down to kidney failure (Bright's disease). He's buried there, in All Saints' Churchyard, Birchington.
What was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's early life?
Rossetti was born in London on May 12, 1828, at 38 Charlotte Street, London.
His father had come to London the hard way. Gabriele Rossetti fled the Kingdom of Naples after the failed revolution of 1820-1821, settled in London as a political exile and eventually became professor of Italian at King's College London. Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, the boy's mother, was the daughter of an Italian translator and tutor.
Books everywhere, then, and talk. Gabriele wrote poetry and specialized in Dante, and Frances, educated herself, was serious about her children's minds. The four Rossetti children grew up on Italian and English literature both, while a constant flow of visitors came through the family home (Italian political exiles, mostly, and English literary figures).
Young Dante Gabriel wrote poetry from an early age and was drawing seriously by his early teens. In 1841 he started at Henry Sass's drawing academy. Then in 1845 the Royal Academy Schools took him, the proper academic start to a painter's career, or that was the idea.
It didn't take. The Academy had him drawing from plaster casts and studying classical anatomy, then copying Old Master paintings, and to Rossetti all of it felt stale. He wanted painting with intense feeling in it, heavy with symbols (a lot to ask of a plaster foot). By 1848 that frustration had turned into something more useful, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Literature Rossetti mostly taught himself. Italian came from his father, and the rest came from reading widely in Italian and English poetry. Out of that reading grew his translations of Italian poetry, Dante Alighieri's "Vita Nuova" above all, alongside other early Italian poets. They're important works in their own right, and you can feel them in his paintings as much as in his poems.
How did Rossetti found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?
Rossetti founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, along with four others: painters James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens, the sculptor Thomas Woolner, and Rossetti's brother William Michael Rossetti (who served as secretary and chronicler of the group). The seven formed the PRB as a secret society of young artists with a shared artistic program.
They met in September 1848 at Millais's family home, 83 Gower Street, and settled on four principles. First, they'd have genuine ideas to express. They'd study nature attentively, too, and sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art. The last rule was the bluntest: produce thoroughly good pictures. Raphael (1483-1520) was the villain. They blamed him for much of what had gone wrong with academic painting, and they meant to reform British painting by going back to the principles of art before him.
Rossetti's own part was partly social. He brought Holman Hunt into the broader circle of friends, and the three principal painters then pulled in the rest. He was the temperament of the thing as well, intense and visionary, the one who kept everybody fired up. And he got a picture out. "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin" (1848-1849) went on show at the Free Exhibition in 1849 signed "P.R.B.," the first painting publicly identified as Pre-Raphaelite.
A magazine came next. The Germ ran to four issues in 1850 as the Pre-Raphaelite manifesto, and Rossetti gave it poetry and prose, plus visual material. It flopped commercially. Still, it's why later readers and historians know exactly what the group thought it stood for.
As a formal group it lasted only a few years. Collinson went first, resigning in 1850 over religious differences. The others drifted into independent careers, still friends and still painting with a family resemblance, and by 1853 the Brotherhood had effectively dissolved. Hunt stayed committed to detailed realism, while Millais went on to commercial success. Rossetti followed his own path, more distinct from both of theirs every year.
What are Dante Gabriel Rossetti's most famous paintings?
Rossetti's most famous paintings include "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin" (1848-1849), "Ecce Ancilla Domini" (also called "The Annunciation," 1849-1850), "Beata Beatrix" (1864-1870), "Lady Lilith" (1866-1873), "Proserpine" (1874), "Astarte Syriaca" (1875-1877), and many other works. Most are in major British museum collections, Tate Britain above all, though some went abroad (Boston's Museum of Fine Arts has Rossetti's work, for one).
Start with "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin" (1848-1849), Rossetti's first major painting. The young Virgin Mary sits embroidering a lily while her mother, Saint Anne, supervises, and religious symbols are tucked into nearly every corner. Shown at the Free Exhibition in 1849, it was the first publicly identified Pre-Raphaelite work, and it announced the Pre-Raphaelite presence in London art.
A year on came the Annunciation. In "Ecce Ancilla Domini" (1849-1850) Mary meets the angel Gabriel in bright white and red against a plain background, still full of symbolic detail. People disliked how unconventionally Rossetti had handled a religious subject, and it caused controversy when first exhibited. (It's the one we'd hang at home, given the chance.)
Then the grief. His wife, Elizabeth Siddal, died of a laudanum overdose in 1862, and Rossetti based "Beata Beatrix" (1864-1870) on her. She becomes Beatrice from Dante's "Vita Nuova," caught at the moment of her death. Few of his works are as personal, or as elegiac. It's at Tate Britain.
Lilith is another matter. In some Jewish folklore tradition she's the legendary first wife of Adam, and in "Lady Lilith" (1866-1873) Rossetti makes her a beautiful red-haired woman combing her hair before a mirror. Archetypal women and dangerous beauty fascinated him, and here they're the whole subject. You'll find it at the Delaware Art Museum.
Jane Morris is the model for "Proserpine" (1874). Proserpine (Persephone in Greek mythology) is the queen of the underworld, trapped between worlds, and Rossetti's picture is really about captivity and the longing for return. The beauty is what keeps you looking. Tate Britain has it.
The big one is "Astarte Syriaca" (1875-1877), a large painting of the Syrian goddess Astarte, tall and powerful and flanked by attendants. Rossetti's late style never got more monumental, or more visually intense. It belongs to the Manchester Art Gallery.
Line them up and you can watch him change. The early Pre-Raphaelite pictures run on detailed observation and bright color, with elaborate symbolism worked in. From the 1860s onward the handling turns more painterly and the color richer. The women grow voluptuous. By then it's all concentration on beauty for its own sake.
What is Dante Gabriel Rossetti's most famous poem?
Rossetti's most famous poem is "The Blessed Damozel," first published in 1850 in The Germ (the Pre-Raphaelite journal) and revised throughout his life. A young woman in heaven looks down at the lover she left on earth and longs for the day they'll be together again. That's the whole situation, and it's enough. It's one of the central works of Victorian Romanticism, and widely anthologized.
The most ambitious thing Rossetti wrote is "The House of Life," a sequence of more than a hundred sonnets published in versions from the 1860s through the 1880s. "Sister Helen" is a ballad. Past those come numerous shorter lyric poems, mostly about love and art, with beauty and mortality never far off. (Not "Goblin Market," though. That one is his sister Christina Rossetti's poem; he designed its illustrations, and illustrated other works of hers too.)
Fame aside, we'd rank "The House of Life" higher. It's one of the major Victorian poetic works. Across more than a hundred sonnets Rossetti keeps circling love and death. Art and beauty are in there too, along with the old puzzle of how the spiritual relates to the physical. The allusions are dense. Dante Alighieri is in there constantly, with the Italian Renaissance sonnet tradition and Romantic poetry close behind, yet the voice and the concerns are distinctly his own.
Not everyone was a fan. In 1871 Robert Buchanan published an essay called "The Fleshly School of Poetry," accusing Rossetti and his circle (Algernon Charles Swinburne and William Morris included) of sensuality and aestheticism. It hurt him deeply, and it fed the depression and chloral addiction of his later years. The "Fleshly School" controversy grew into one of the major Victorian literary disputes of the period.
The books are "Poems" (1870) and "Ballads and Sonnets" (1881), with a grim story behind the first. In 1862 Rossetti had buried the manuscript of his poems with his wife, Elizabeth Siddal. In 1869, preparing the 1870 volume, he had her coffin exhumed to recover it (more on that below). William Michael Rossetti edited the collected poems after his death.
What was Rossetti's relationship with Elizabeth Siddal?
Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862) was a working-class hat shop assistant whom Rossetti met around 1850 and who became his primary model, artistic partner, and eventually his wife. From the early 1850s until her death in 1862, she sat at the center of Rossetti's life and work.
Walter Deverell got to her first, at least as a model. She's also the drowned Ophelia in Millais's famous painting Ophelia (1851-1852). From around 1852, though, she modeled for Rossetti and nobody else, and over the rest of the decade the two fell in love. Siddal was a poet and painter herself, and Rossetti pushed her to keep at both.
The engagement dragged on for nearly a decade, held up by one obstacle after another. In May 1860 they finally married, at Saint Clement's Church in Hastings, England. It was a troubled marriage. Her health was declining and Rossetti was emotionally unstable, and the tension never really let up.
On February 11, 1862, she died of a laudanum overdose. She was 32. The inquest at the time ruled it accidental; modern medical understanding points to likely suicide. The year before, her pregnancy had ended in a stillborn daughter, and that loss, on top of depression and chronic illness, helped bring her to the end.
Rossetti took it very hard, and for a long time. Into her coffin, as a gesture of mourning, went the only complete manuscript of his poems. Seven years later, in 1869, he had the coffin exhumed to get the manuscript back for publication. Few episodes of his life get discussed more, and it left him with deep guilt and regret.
His real memorial to her is a painting. In "Beata Beatrix" (1864-1870) she becomes Beatrice from Dante's Vita Nuova at the moment of her death, and nothing else Rossetti painted is quite so personal, or so powerful.
What was Rossetti's relationship with Jane Morris?
Jane Morris (born Jane Burden, 1839-1914) was the wife of William Morris and Rossetti's primary muse and creative partner from the late 1860s until Rossetti's death in 1882. Victorian London society found the relationship controversial, and it was complicated by any measure.
They met in Oxford in 1857. Rossetti had come up for the Oxford Union murals project, and he and Edward Burne-Jones were painting the murals when they came across Jane Burden, a working-class Oxford woman. She modeled for his painting "Guenevere" and for other Pre-Raphaelite paintings. In 1859 she married William Morris, and she was central to the Morris household, first at Red House in Kent and later at Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire.
Through the 1860s Rossetti and William Morris became close friends, and Rossetti was at the house constantly. Somewhere in all those visits his relationship with Jane Morris changed. By the late 1860s she was his creative partner and his emotional one, sitting for painting after painting, and he wrote poem after poem addressed to her. Her husband appears to have known about it and tolerated it.
Kelmscott Manor gave them room. Rossetti and Morris jointly leased the country house from 1871 onward, and Rossetti and Jane spent extended periods there together. Her face is all over the important late work. She's Proserpine, and she's Astarte Syriaca. Mariana too, and many others besides, all of them shaped by how closely the two worked together.
It faded rather than ended. Rossetti's mental and physical health declined through the late 1870s and early 1880s, and the relationship wound down with it, though they stayed close until his death in 1882. Jane Morris outlived him by thirty-two years. Right up to her own death in 1914 she remained central to William Morris's life and to the broader Pre-Raphaelite circle.
What is Dante Gabriel Rossetti known for?
Rossetti is known for several major contributions to British art and literature: founding the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, producing some of the most iconic Pre-Raphaelite paintings (especially of beautiful female figures), writing major Victorian poetry (especially "The Blessed Damozel" and the sonnet sequence "The House of Life"), serving as a link between the Pre-Raphaelite generation and the later Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements, and bringing Italian Renaissance and medieval subject matter into Victorian English art.
In paint, it's the women first. Rossetti's female figures are intensely beautiful and the color around them is rich, with dense symbolism and a deliberately non-academic style on top. Subjects mostly came from the Italian Renaissance or the Middle Ages. Dante and Beatrice turn up again and again. So does Arthurian legend, along with biblical themes, all given characteristic Pre-Raphaelite detail. Later it was mostly beautiful women in luxurious settings, the Aesthetic Movement's beauty-for-its-own-sake idea in a nutshell.
For poetry, the big two are "The House of Life" and "The Blessed Damozel." Add the ballads ("Sister Helen" among them) and the translations of Italian poetry, Dante Alighieri's "Vita Nuova" especially, plus other early Italian poets. Rossetti's verse is deeply symbolic and aesthetically intense, and it traveled. The Aesthetic Movement of the 1870s-1880s learned from it, and so, later, did Symbolist poetry.
Rossetti's influence outlived the Brotherhood itself, feeding two major movements. The Aesthetic Movement (1860s-1890s) drew heavily on his emphasis on beauty. It borrowed his decorative detail and rich color, too. The Arts and Crafts Movement, led by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, grew out of the Pre-Raphaelite circle around Rossetti. Between them they shaped late Victorian and early modern British design (which is why a wallpaper company is writing about a poet-painter at all).
He was magnetic company, by most accounts. Rossetti was one of the most charismatic and influential British artists of his generation, and his friendships and creative partnerships reached virtually every important British artist and writer of the second half of the nineteenth century. Our Arts and Crafts Movement guide follows the decorative tradition that descended from the Pre-Raphaelite circle around Rossetti.
What is Rossetti's best painting?
Different critics and viewers identify different paintings as Rossetti's best, but the most often cited candidates include "Beata Beatrix" (1864-1870), "Proserpine" (1874), "Lady Lilith" (1866-1873), "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin" (1848-1849), and "Astarte Syriaca" (1875-1877).
Most often the vote goes to "Beata Beatrix" (1864-1870), frequently called Rossetti's masterpiece. As a memorial to Elizabeth Siddal it carries deep personal meaning, and its symbolism draws on Dante's "Vita Nuova," all in his full mature style. With that emotional weight and that visual power, it's no surprise it's widely considered his finest single work. It hangs at Tate Britain.
Our own pick would be "Proserpine" (1874), and we're not alone. People often cite its powerful image of Jane Morris as the queen of the underworld, and all the symbolism packed into it. Rossetti's late style never got more controlled, or more emotionally resonant. Tate Britain again.
Really, the choice of "best" comes down to what you value. For technical innovation and Pre-Raphaelite principle, "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin" (his first major painting) is the founding moment. Nothing matches "Beata Beatrix" for emotional depth and personal meaning. "Astarte Syriaca" is the most ambitious, monumental and aesthetically concentrated. And for complete mature command of style, "Proserpine" is widely considered the most successful, which is partly why it's ours.
Want to see them in person? Tate Britain and the Manchester Art Gallery hold the major Rossetti collections, which between them give you direct access to his most important paintings. Boston's Museum of Fine Arts has other major works. So do the Delaware Art Museum and other international collections.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti questions
Who was Dante Gabriel Rossetti?
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was a British poet and painter born in London in 1828. He was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (founded in 1848 with William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and four others) and later a major figure in the Aesthetic Movement. The short version? He's the bridge from the Pre-Raphaelite generation to the Arts and Crafts Movement around William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Rossetti filled Italian Renaissance and medieval subject matter with intense Victorian emotion and aestheticism.
What is Dante Gabriel Rossetti known for?
Rossetti is known for founding the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, producing iconic Pre-Raphaelite paintings (especially of beautiful female figures including Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris), writing major Victorian poetry (especially "The Blessed Damozel" and the sonnet sequence "The House of Life"), and serving as a link between the Pre-Raphaelite generation and the later Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements. Tate Britain is the easiest place to see why.
What is Dante Gabriel Rossetti's most famous poem?
Rossetti's most famous poem is "The Blessed Damozel," first published in 1850 in The Germ (the Pre-Raphaelite journal) and revised throughout his life. A young woman in heaven looks down at her earthbound lover, longing for their eventual reunion. Read one more and make it "The House of Life," the sonnet sequence (more than a hundred sonnets on love and art, beauty and death). After that there's "Sister Helen," a ballad, and his many translations of Italian poetry, Dante Alighieri's "Vita Nuova" included.
What is Rossetti most famous for?
Rossetti is most famous for being one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and for his paintings of beautiful female figures (especially Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris). Two women, mostly: Siddal in the 1850s, Jane Morris from the late 1860s. His pictures and poems both run on intense color and dense symbols, with real emotional depth. Rossetti's influence reached past his own work, too, into the Aesthetic Movement and the Arts and Crafts Movement.
What is Rossetti's best painting?
Different critics identify different paintings as Rossetti's best. The names that come up most are "Beata Beatrix" (1864-1870, a memorial to Elizabeth Siddal) and "Proserpine" (1874, with Jane Morris as model), both now at Tate Britain. "Lady Lilith" (1866-1873) gets mentioned, as does "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin" (1848-1849, his first major painting). "Beata Beatrix" is most often named his masterpiece, for its personal meaning and its mature style. We'd still take "Proserpine."
When was Dante Gabriel Rossetti born?
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born in London on May 12, 1828, at 38 Charlotte Street, London. Rossetti died a long way from there, at the seaside town of Birchington-on-Sea in Kent, England, on April 9, 1882. Chloral addiction, from around 1870, had worn him down, though his death is usually put down to kidney failure (Bright's disease). He's buried at All Saints' Churchyard, Birchington.
Who founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in London in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, along with painters James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens, the sculptor Thomas Woolner, and Rossetti's brother William Michael Rossetti (the art critic). The three painters came first and pulled in the other four, which is how a trio became seven. They started out as a secret society of young artists bent on reforming British painting.
Who was Rossetti married to?
Rossetti married Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862) in May 1860 at Saint Clement's Church in Hastings, England. It lasted less than two years. She had been his primary model and creative partner since the early 1850s, and the marriage was troubled. In February 1862 she died of a laudanum overdose at age 32. He never really got over it, and his painting Beata Beatrix (1864-1870) was his memorial to her.
