Dante Gabriel Rossetti
American-born, British-based artist
1828 CE to 1882 CE
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882) is an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator.
He founds the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and is later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.
His work also influences the European Symbolists and is a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement.
Rossetti's art is characterized by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism.
His early poetry is influenced by John Keats.
His later poetry is characterized by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence The House of Life.
Poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossetti's work; he frequently writes sonnets to accompany his pictures, spanning from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Astarte Syriaca (1877), while also creating art to illustrate poems such as Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti, his sister and celebrated poet.
Rossetti's personal life is closely linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and muses Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, and Jane Morris.
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The Pre-Raphaelites, led by Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rosetti and John Everett Millais and defended by John Ruskin, reject the art world’s contemporary academicism and seek a return to the purity of the Early Renaissance.
Alfred Tennyson's early poetry, with its medievalism and powerful visual imagery, Is a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
In 1848, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt HAD made a list of "Immortals", artistic heroes whom they admired, especially from literature, notably including Keats and Tennyson, whose work WILL form subjects for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood paintings.
The Lady of Shalott alone Is a subject for Rossetti, Hunt, John William Waterhouse (three versions), and Elizabeth Siddall.
ON September 27, 1855, Tennyson reads from his new book Maud and other poems, at a social gathering in the home of Robert and Elizabeth Browning in London; Dante Gabriel Rossetti makes a sketch of him doing so.
Ford Madox Brown, born in Calais, had studied art in Antwerp under Egide Charles Gustave Wappers.
In 1843, he had submitted work to the Westminster Cartoon Competition, for compositions to decorate the new Palace of Westminster.
He was not successful.
His early works were, however, greatly admired by the young Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who had asked him to become his tutor.
Through Rossetti, Brown had come into contact with the artists who went on to form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB).
Though closely linked to them, he is never actually a member of the brotherhood itself.
Nevertheless, he remains close to Rossetti, with whom he had also joined William Morris's design company, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., in 1861.
He is a close friend of the landscape artist Henry Mark Anthony.
Brown was also the main organizer of the Hogarth Club, a short lived replacement for the PRB that exists between 1858 and 1861.
One of his most famous images is The Last of England, which had been sold in March 1859 for 325 Guineas (2010: £25,800).
It depicts a pair of stricken emigrants as they sail away on the ship that will take them from England forever.
It was inspired by the departure of the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner, who had left for Australia.
The painting is structured with Brown's characteristic linear energy, and emphasis on apparently grotesque and banal details, such as the cabbages hanging from the ship's side.
Work, a painting by Ford Madox Brown, is generally considered to be his most important achievement.
It attempts to portray, both literally and analytically, the totality of the Victorian social system and the transition from a rural to an urban economy.
The painting had been commissioned by Thomas Plint, a well-known collector of Pre-Raphaelite art, who died before its completion.
Brown had begun the painting in 1852 and completes it in 1865, when he sets up a special exhibition to showcase it along with several of his other works.
Each character represents a particular social class and role in the modern urban environment.
He writes a detailed catalogue explaining the significance of the picture.
The picture depicts a group of so-called "Navvies" digging up the road to build a system of underground tunnels.
It is typically assumed that these were part of the extensions of London's sewerage system, which were being undertaken to deal with the threat of typhus and cholera.
The workers are in the center of the painting.
On either side of them are individuals who are either unemployed or represent the leisured classes.
Behind the workers are two aristocrats on horseback, whose progress along the road has been halted by the excavations.
The painting also portrays an election campaign, evidenced by posters and people carrying sandwich boards with the name of the candidate "Bobus".
A poster also draws attention to the potential presence of a burglar.
The scene is set on The Mount on Heath Street in Hampstead, London, a side road which rises up from the main road and runs alongside it.
Brown had made a detailed study of the location in 1852.
Brown's concern with the social issues addressed in Work prompts him to open a soup kitchen for Manchester's hungry, and to attempt to aid the city's unemployed to find work by founding a labor exchange.
French symbolist poetry influences the Poems and Ballads of the English Decadent Algernon Charles Swinburne and the experimental poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins.
Swinburne, born at 7 Chester Street, Grosvenor Place, London, on April 5, 1837, was the eldest of six children born to Captain (later Admiral) Charles Henry Swinburne and Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the 3rd Earl of Ashburnham.
He had grown up at East Dene in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight and had attended Eton College 1849–53, where he first started writing poetry, and then Balliol College, Oxford 1856–60 with a brief hiatus when he was rusticated from the university in 1859 for having publicly supported the attempted assassination of Napoleon III by Felice Orsini, returning in May 1860, though he never receives a degree.
He had spent summer holidays at Capheaton Hall in Northumberland, the house of his grandfather, Sir John Swinburne, 6th Baronet (1762–1860) who had a famous library and was President of the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Swinburne had considered Northumberland to be his native county, an emotion memorably reflected in poems like the intensely patriotic 'Northumberland', 'Grace Darling' and others.
He enjoyed riding his pony across the moors (he was a daring horseman) 'through honeyed leagues of the northland border'.
He never called it the Scottish border.
In the years 1857–60, Swinburne had become one of Lady Pauline Trevelyan's intellectual circle at Wallington Hall and after his grandfather's death in 1860, would stay with William Bell Scott in Newcastle.
In December 1862, Swinburne had accompanied Scott and his guests, probably including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on a trip to Tynemouth.
Scott writes in his memoirs that as they walked by the sea, Swinburne had declaimed the as yet unpublished 'Hymn to Proserpine' and 'Laus Veneris' in his lilting intonation, while the waves 'were running the whole length of the long level sands towards Cullercoats and sounding like far-off acclamations'.
At Oxford, Swinburne had met several Pre-Raphaelites, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
He had also met William Morris.
After leaving college, he lived in London and started an active writing career, where Rossetti had been delighted with his 'little Northumbrian friend’.
Poems and Ballads causes a sensation when it is first published, especially the poems written in homage of Sappho of Lesbos such as "Anactoria" and "Sapphics": Moxon and Co. transfers its publication rights to John Camden Hotten.
Other poems in this volume such as "The Leper," "Laus Veneris," and "St Dorothy" evoke a Victorian fascination with the Middle Ages, and are explicitly medieval in style, tone and construction.
Also featured in this volume are "Hymn to Proserpine", "The Triumph of Time" and "Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)".