Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a poet as well as a painter, and the most disorderly figure in Victorian art. Born in London in 1828 to an exiled Italian political refugee who lectured on Dante, and brother to the poet Christina Rossetti, he grew up in a household of literature and Italian politics. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools without much patience for its methods, and in 1848, with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, founded the Brotherhood — seven young men committed to abandoning the idealising conventions taught since Raphael in favour of sharp detail, bright colour and serious subjects taken from scripture and literature. His early paintings, including The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini, were attacked when the initials PRB were decoded as a secret society. He largely withdrew from public exhibition afterwards, working for private patrons. He met Elizabeth Siddal around 1849, and she became his model, his pupil and eventually his wife in 1860. She was in poor health and dependent on laudanum, and died of an overdose in 1862 after a stillbirth. Rossetti buried the manuscript of his poems in her coffin, and seven years later had the grave opened to retrieve them for publication. His later paintings are dominated by close-up images of women with heavy hair and long necks, painted from Fanny Cornforth and from Jane Morris, the wife of his friend William Morris, with whom he had a long affair. A hostile review of his 1870 Poems accusing him of a fleshly school of poetry precipitated a breakdown. He became addicted to chloral and whisky, and died at Birchington in 1882.

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