Dante Gabriel Rossetti Biography and List of Works

Painter and poet, Brother of poet Christina Rossetti, and 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. Rossetti's poems are distinguished by fantasy, leading the reader to ages past, to medieval colour, Arthurian legend, and Dantesque mysticism.

I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell;
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
(from 'Sudden Light', 1881)

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 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. His early poems, such as 'The Blessed Damozel', a highly symbolic work, and 'My Sister's Sleep', were published in the Pre-Raphaelite magazine The Germ in 1850. Rossetti enjoyed a modest success as a writer when his translations in THE EARLY ITALIAN POETS appeared in 1861. 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 writing. She modelled 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.

A Sonnet is a moment's monument -
Memorial from the Soul's eternity
To one dead deathless hour.
(from The House of Life, 1870-1881)

In 1868 Rossetti showed renewed interest in poetry. Sixteen sonnets, including the 'Willowwood' sequence, were published in The Forthnightly Review in 1869. He had a close relationship with Jane Morris, wife of the painter William Morris and wrote the ballad 'Rose Mary'. In 1871 appeared R. Buchanan's pamphlet 'The Fleshy School of Poetry' in the Contemporary Review, in which Rossetti and his associates were accused of obscenity. Rossetti's reply, 'The Stealthy School of Criticism', appeared in The Athenaeum in 1872.

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.

For further reading: A Victorian Romantic by Oswald Doughty (1960); The Dark Glass by R.J.R. Howard (1972); The Pre-Raphaelite Poems by L. Stevenson (1972); Four Rossettis by S. Weintraub (1977); Dante Gabriel Rossetti : His Friends and Enemies by Helen Rossetti Angeli(1977); Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Man of Letters by Frank V. Rutter (978); Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Joseph Knight (1987); Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poet and Painter by Eben E. Bass(990); 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) - See also: John Keats, Volter Kilpi - Note: Rossetti illustrated an edition of Alfred Tennyson's Poems (1857). The most widely known of his translations are the three from Villon, especially the Ballad of Dead Ladies, and Dante's Vita Nuova. - Gabriele Rossetti: works include Dante Commedia (1826), Lo Spirito antipapale che produssela Riforma (1832), Poems (1833), La Beatrice Dante (1842), Il veggente in solitudine (1846), L'arpa evangelica (1852).

THE BLESSED DAMOZEL, (1850)