This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
 A painter and poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a key member of the
Pre-Raphaelites in England, a group of painters and poets led by
Rossetti, John Ruskin, William Holman Hunt and John Millais.
Their aesthetic goal was to return to a medieval period, 'pre Raphael',
meaning before the influence of the painter Raphael (1483-1520) and to
re-vitalize the medieval focus on religion and realism that held
closely to nature.
Rossetti was born to the exiled Italian scholar, Gabriel Rossetti, and
was the brother of Christina Rossetti, a prominent poet. Dante
Rosetti became a student from 1845 to 1847 at the Royal Academy Antique
School, and there began the association with Hunt and Millais.
Rossetti's early pre-Raphaelite paintings had religious and mystical
symbolism, but criticism of his painting, led him to show his paintings
in private circumstances and to do watercolors instead of oils.
His primary theme became romantic love, and in many of his works, he
depicted his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, whom he married in 1860.
However, two years later she died.
He spent his last years in seclusion, apparently depressed by public
criticism of his poetry and paintings and by personal experiences
including complications with women and drugs mixed with alcohol to
combat insomnia .
Sources include:
Grace Glueck, "Art: The American Pre-Raphelites", The New York Times, October 11, 2006
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/rossetti/
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dgr/dgrseti13.html
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Biography from South Coast Fine Art:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
Painter and poet, Rossetti was one of the founding members of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Although the movement was on the wane
by the mid-1850s, new disciples Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris
brought with them fresh enthusiasm.
Rosetti was born in
London, the son of the poet Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1854), and Frances
Mary Lavinia Polidori Rossetti, sister of Byron's physician, Dr. John
Polidori. Thus Rossetti's background was essentially
Italian. As a child he steeped himself in romantic
literature. From 1836 to 1843, he studied at the King's College
School, London. Between the years 1843 and 1846, he attended
Cary's Art Academy, and entered the Royal Academy in 1848, where he
spent an unfruitful period. In the same year he founded with John
Everett Millais, Holman Hunt, and others the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood. The three men were one in their rejection of Victorian
materialism. They admired the works of early Italian artists and wanted
to bring back into art a pre-Renaissance purity of style and form.
For
many years Rossetti was known as a painter. He idealized his
subjects, employing the literary themes of medieval romances to do
so. The art critic Ruskin started to buy his painting, and
Rossetti's reputation as an artist finally began to spread.
In
most of Rossetti's early pictures his archetypal ladies were based upon
his wife, the beautiful Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal. He had met her
in 1850, and they married in 1860 when she was already in poor
health. He encouraged her own painting and also writing.
She modeled for him and many others in his circle - perhaps the most
impressive portrait is the drowned Ophelia in Millais's painting.
After his wife died of an overdose of laudanum in 1862, Rossetti buried
the only complete manuscript of his poems with her. The
manuscript was later recovered and published in 1870. It included
most of his best verse and established his reputation as a poet.
Although Rossetti had not been a faithful to Elizabeth, her loss left
an increasing sadness in his work.
Though he was admired by a
younger generation of aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde, Rossetti's later
years were clouded by health problems, morbidity and paranoia.
From 1869 to 1871, he painted his last important picture, Dante's Dream. In 1872 he attempted suicide. Before his death at the age of fifty-three in 1882, he published Poems and Ballads and Sonnets (1881). The latter completed 'The House of Life', which had appeared eleven years earlier.
Sources:
Dante Gabriel Rossetti : His Friends and Enemies by Helen Rossetti Angeli(1977); Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Man of Letters by Frank V. Rutter (1978);
Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Joseph Knight (1987); Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poet and Painter by Eben E. Bass(1990); Critical Essays on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. by David G. Riede (1992); Dante Gabriel Rossetti Revisited by David G. Riede(1992); Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Alicia Craig Faxon(1994); Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Russell Ash (1995); Rossetti and His Circle by Elizabeth Prettejohn (1998); Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost by Jerome J. McGann (2000)
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