Rossetti, Dante Gabriel

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (dăn`tē gā`brēəl rōsĕt`ē), 1828–82, English poet and painter; son of Gabriele Rossetti and brother of Christina Rossetti. He was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelites. In addition to attending the Royal Academy he studied painting briefly with Ford Madox Brown. In 1848 he became acquainted with W. Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais and with them formed the brotherhood of Pre-Raphaelites. In an effort to spread their ideas the group published in 1850 a short-lived magazine, the Germ, edited by Rossetti's brother William Michael Rossetti (1829–1919). In it was printed "The Blessed Damozel" by Dante Gabriel, written when he was 19 and considered by many to be his best poem. In 1851, John Ruskin championed the Pre-Raphaelites, and shortly thereafter made an arrangement with Rossetti to buy all of Rossetti's paintings that pleased him; thus, Rossetti became financially solvent. In 1860 he married his model Elizabeth Siddal, a former milliner's assistant whom he loved and had been more or less engaged to for nearly 10 years. Melancholic and tubercular, she took an overdose of laudanum and died in 1862. Rossetti, in a fit of guilt and grief, buried with her a manuscript containing a number of his poems. Some years later he permitted her body to be exhumed and the poems recovered. The first edition of his collected works appeared in 1870. The last years of his life were marked by an increasingly morbid state of mind (he became addicted to alcohol and chloral), and for a time he was considered insane. Although he began his career as a painter, Rossetti's lasting reputation rests upon his poetry. He never really mastered the technique of painting, and although his pictures are extremely sensuous, they are also somewhat two-dimensional. His best artistic efforts are his drawings, particularly the pen-and-ink portraits of his mother, his sister, and his wife. Almost inseparable in tone and feeling from his paintings, his poetry is noted for its pictorial effects and its atmosphere of luxurious beauty. Although there is always passion in his verse, there is also always thought. He was a master of the sonnet form, and his sonnet sequence "The House of Life" is one of his finest works. His other notable works include the ballad "Sister Helen" and the dramatic monologues "Jenny" and "A Last Confession." His translations from the Italian appeared as Dante and His Circle (1861). There are examples of his paintings in the Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and in many collections in England and the United States.

Bibliography

See his poems (ed. by O. Doughty, 1957); biographies by O. Doughty (2d ed. 1963), E. Waugh (1928, repr. 1969), and A. Faxon (1989); studies by S. A. Brooke (1908, repr. 1964), G. H. Fleming (1967), R. S. Fraser, ed. (1972), J. Rees (1981), and D. G. Riede (1983).

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Rossetti, Dante Gabriel

 orig. Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, photograph by Lewis Carroll, 1863

(credit: The Bettmann Archive)

(born May 12, 1828, London, Eng.—died April 9, 1882, Birchington-on-Sea, Kent) British painter and poet. Son of Gabriele Rossetti and brother of Christina Rossetti, he trained at the Royal Academy but vacillated between painting and poetry. As an informal pupil of Ford Madox Brown, he absorbed Brown's admiration for the German Nazarenes. In 1848, with several friends, he formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters treating religious, moral, and medieval subjects in a naturalistic style. Rossetti expanded the Brotherhood's aims by linking poetry, painting, and Social Idealism and by treating “Pre-Raphaelite” as synonymous with a romanticized medieval past. When his oil paintings were severely criticized, he turned to watercolours based on literary works, which he could more easily sell to acquaintances, and became very successful. The group broke up in 1852, but Rossetti revived it in 1856 with Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. After the death of his long-ailing wife in 1862, possibly by suicide, literary themes gave way to pictures of women, particularly Morris's wife, Jane. His poetry, including the sonnet sequence “The House of Life,” was widely admired. He broke with Morris in 1875 over his love for Jane and spent his later years as an alcoholic recluse.