Dante Gabriel Rossetti
1828-1882

English poet and painter who was a leading member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood devoted to reviving English art through medieval inspiration. He was strongly attracted to the dramatic and the supernatural, both of which are represented in his work. Among his earliest paintings was a scene of the annunciation, Ecce Ancilla Domini (The Annunciation, 1850, Tate Gallery, London). His art subsequently developed through other phases, in which the sense of human beauty, intensity of abstract expression, and richness of color were leading elements.

Rossetti encouraged fellow Pre-Raphaelites William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones after they left Oxford, improving their technique and unleashing their creativity.

Sorrow and depression, relieved only by his creative outlets, marred Rossetti's later years. In 1860 he had married a milliner, Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, whose beauty he immortalized in many of his best-known paintings, such as "Mary Magdalene" at the "House of Simon the Pharisee" (1858, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). Within two years Elizabeth died, and Rossetti was grief stricken by the tragedy. In addition, he was troubled by a bitter attack that had been made on the morality of his poems in an article entitled "The Fleshy School of Poetry," published in The Contemporary Review in October 1871. Rossetti's rebuttal was published as "The Stealthy School of Criticism" in the Athenaeum in December 1871.

Rossetti continued to produce paintings and poems until late in his life. In 1881 he published Ballads and Sonnets, which contained some of his finest work: "Rose Mary","The White Ship","The King's Tragedy" and the sonnet sequence The House of Life. Of his later paintings, which are murky and dreamlike, two of the best known are Dante's Dream (1871, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and Proserpina