Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1828–1882 | Tate Wikipedia entry Artist biography Rossetti was born in London. His father, an Italian political refugee, was a poet and Dante scholar and from 1831 Professor of Italian at King's College, London. His mother, who was half Italian and half English, was a private teacher. His sister Christina (1830-94) later became a poet. He entered Sass's Drawing Academy probably in late summer 1841. He joined the Royal Academy Schools as a probationer in 1844, becoming a full student in December 1845. By 1847 he was considering careers in both poetry and painting . He was briefly a pupil of Ford Madox Brown in March 1848. In August 1848 he moved with William Holman Hunt to a studio in Cleveland Street and around September that year founded, with Holman Hunt and J.E. Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He finished his translation of Dante's Vita Nuova in October 1848.

He exhibited his first major oil painting, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (Tate Gallery N04872 ), at the Free Exhibition in March 1849. In September and October of that year he visited Paris and Flanders with Holman Hunt, and was greatly impressed by mediaeval and Renaissance art. He probably met his future wife and frequent model Elizabeth Siddall late in 1849; they married in 1860. He was largely responsible for the Pre-Raphaelite magazine The Germ, published in 1850. In April 1850 he exhibited Ecce Ancilla Domini! (Tate Gallery N01210 ) at the National Institution, but rarely showed in public thereafter following the picture's negative reception. From 1854 he was friendly with the critic John Ruskin, who was instrumental in bringing the Pre-Raphaelites to public attention, and in 1855-6 with the poet Robert Browning. In 1855 he went to Paris to see the Exposition Universelle. In 1856 he met Edward Coley Burne-Jones and William Morris; he was a contributor to Morris's Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.

Five of his illustrations were included in Moxon's edition of Tennyson's Poems (published 1857). He showed eight works in the private Pre-Raphaelite exhibition, held at Russell Place in July 1857. Also that year he worked on the Oxford Union murals, during which time he met Jane Burden. Jane married William Morris but she and Rossetti had an intimate relationship which spanned decades, and she posed for some of Rossetti's best-known paintings (see Proserpine, 1874, Tate Gallery N05064 ). In 1858 Rossetti founded the Hogarth Club, an exhibiting and social club, with Madox Brown and others. Around this time he met Fanny Cornforth, who became his primary model and mistress for the next decade. Rossetti's translation of The Early Italian Poets was published in 1861. In 1862 Elizabeth Siddall died from an overdose of laudanum. The artist visited Belgium with his brother William in 1863, and was in Paris in 1864.

In 1865 he met Alexa Wilding, who became an important model for him. From the mid-1860s he began suffering from eye trouble and insomnia, and showed signs of paranoia. In October 1869 he exhumed his wife's coffin to retrieve his Poems, which were published in 1870. His health broke down in 1872 and he abandoned most of his old friendships. He spent long periods at Jane and William Morris's Kelmscott Manor between 1871 and 1874. A new edition of Poems was published in 1881 together with Ballads and Sonnets. He died at Birchington-on-Sea, Kent. Further reading: Virginia Surtees, Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1828-1882.

The Paintings and Drawings: A Catalogue Raisonné, 2 volumes, Oxford 1971Leslie Parris (ed.), The Pre-Raphaelites, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1984, reprinted 1994 Terry Riggs Read more Wikipedia entry Dante Gabriel Rossetti (/ˈdænti ˈɡeɪbriəl rəˈzɛti/; 12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882) was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Rossetti was 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 influenced the European Symbolists and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement. Rossetti's art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats.

His later poetry was characterised 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 wrote 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 the celebrated poet Christina Rossetti, his sister. Rossetti's personal life was closely linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and muses Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris. Dante Gabriel Rossetti | Poetry Foundation Dante Gabriel Rossetti Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born 12 May 1828 in London, the second child and eldest son of Italian expatriates. His father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a Dante scholar, who had been exiled from Naples for writing poetry in support of the Neapolitan Constitution of 1819. Rossetti’s mother had trained as a governess and supervised her children's early education.

Few Victorian families were as gifted as the Rossettis: the oldest child, Maria Rossetti, published A Shadow of Dante (1871) and became an Anglican nun; William Michael Rossetti was along with his brother an active member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and became an editor, man of letters, and memoirist; the youngest, Christina Georgina Rossetti , became an important and influential lyric poet. As a child Dante Gabriel Rossetti intended to be a painter and illustrated literary subjects in his earliest drawings. He was tutored at home in German and read the Bible, Shakespeare , Goethe's Faust, The Arabian Nights, Dickens, and the poetry of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron . After leaving school, he apprenticed himself to the historical painter Ford Madox Brown, who later became his closest lifelong friend. He also continued his extensive reading of poetry— Poe , Shelley , Coleridge , Blake , Keats , Browning , and Tennyson —and began in 1845 translations from Italian and German medieval poetry.

In 1847 and 1848 Rossetti began several important early poems—” My Sister's Sleep ,” “The Blessed Damozel,” “The Bride's Prelude,” “On Mary's Portrait,” “Ave,” “ Jenny ,” “Dante at Verona,” “A Last Confession,” and several sonnets, a form in which he eventually became expert. Rossetti divided his attention between painting and poetry for the rest of his life. In 1848 he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with six other young men, mostly painters, who shared an interest in contemporary poetry and an opposition to certain stale conventions of contemporary academy art. In a general way, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood sought to introduce new forms of thematic seriousness, high coloration, and attention to detail into contemporary British art. Members of the group included John Everett Millais, its most skilled painter and future president of the Royal Academy, and William Holman Hunt, Thomas Woolner; Frederic Stephens; and William Michael Rossetti, who as P.R.B. secretary kept a journal of activities and edited the six issues of its periodical, the Germ (1850).

Associates of the group included the older painter Ford Madox Brown, the painter and poet William Bell Scott, the poet Coventry Patmore , and Christina Rossetti , six of whose poems appeared in the Germ. The Pre-Raphaelite Brothers provided each other with companionship, criticism, and encouragement early in their careers and defended each other against initial public hostility. Dante Gabriel Rossetti shaped the group's literary tastes, pressed for the founding of the Germ, and published several poems in it, including “ My Sister's Sleep .” He also contributed an allegorical prose tale, “Hand and Soul,” in which a thirteenth-century Italian painter, Chiaro dell' Erma, is visited by a woman representing his soul, who tells him, “Paint me thus, as I am ....so shall thy soul stand before thee always”—an early suggestion of Rossetti's later artistic preoccupation with dreamlike, heavily stylized female figures. In the late 1840s, Rossetti began exhibiting his paintings and, in 1850 met Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, “Lizzie,” then sixteen or seventeen years old. Lizzie became Rossetti’s model, and eventually his wife.

After losing a child, she committed suicide in 1862; already depressed, her death pushed Rossetti into deeper melancholy. As a last tribute Rossetti placed a manuscript of his poems in his wife's grave, a decision he later regretted. However marked by tragedy, the 1850s and ‘60s saw Rossetti’s reputation grow rapidly. In 1856 several university undergraduates, including William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, began a journal modeled after the Germ. Entitled the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, it had a run of twelve issues to which Rossetti contributed three poems. Through his connection to the magazine, Rossetti met Jane Burden—his life-long muse and mistress—and introduced her to her future husband William Morris. The triangle between Rossetti, Jane Burden, and Morris was complex. Rossetti cofounded a firm of designers comprised of Morris and others, doing decorative work for churches and private houses. Morris seems to have been aware of the affair, and even to some extent sanctioned it. Rossetti’s first portraits of Jane Burden, in crayon, pencil, and oil, are usually considered his most striking artistic work.

Letters from Rossetti to Morris reveal that by 1869 she had become the center of his emotional life: “All that concerns you is the all-absorbing question with me... no absence can ever make me so far from you again as your presence did for years. For this long inconceivable change, you know now what my thanks must be.” Jane Morris suffered from poor health, however, and by the late 1860s, Rossetti had also begun to show physical and mental ailments which burdened him for the rest of his life: uncertain eyesight, headaches, insomnia, a hydrocele which made sitting difficult and required periodic drainage, and growing fear of, and distaste for, the outer world. However, the years of Rossetti's relationship with Jane Morris coincided with some of his most vigorous poetic activity: 1869 was an annus mirabilis.

In addition to about seventeen “House of Life” sonnets, Rossetti worked on revisions to “Dante at Verona,” “ Jenny ,” and “A Last Confession”; composed the highly erotic “Eden Bower” and “Troy Town”; wrote several more sonnets on pictures; and began “ The Stream's Secret ,” which he completed the next year. In the March 1869 Fortnightly Review, he published the four Willowwood sonnets, whose presentation of erotic frustration and intensity exemplifies his best style, as in Love's song from sonnet three: “O Ye, all ye that walk in Willowwood, That walk with hollow faces burning white; What fathom-depth of soul-struck widowhood, What long, what longer hours, one lifelong night, Ere ye again, who so in vain have wooed Your last hope lost, who so in vain invite Your lips to that their unforgotten food, Ere ye, ere ye again shall see the light!” Rossetti decided in 1869 to publish a volume of his poems, and in October he employed Charles Augustus Howell and others to exhume the manuscript from his wife's grave.

Rossetti's year of production was not without its shadows: in his 1892 Autobiographical Notes, William Bell Scott related that during a visit to Scotland, Rossetti showed fear at a chaffinch which he felt contained the spirit of his dead wife. In the spring of 1870 Rossetti rested his eyesight at the estate of Barbara Bodichon in Scalands, Sussex, near Jane Morris, at Hastings for her health. The Morrises visited Rossetti together, and Jane Morris remained with him while her husband returned to work. At Scalands Rossetti also began to drink chloral with whiskey to counter his insomnia. Chloral induces paranoia and depression, both latent traits of Rossetti's character. His suspiciousness, reclusiveness, and fear of strangers steadily worsened. Throughout 1870 Rossetti lodged in various country houses with Jane Morris, continuing to write poems and add sonnets to his long sequence, “The House of Life.” Rossetti and Jane Morris's brief period of apparent happiness and (presumably) sexual liaison has attracted biographers by its supposed romantic unconventionality.

It might be more sympathetic as well as realistic to keep in mind the situation's infirmities and constraints: Rossetti's obesity, addiction, hydrocele, bad eyesight, and growing anxieties; and Jane Morris's ever-present children, neuralgia, and bad back. Rossetti’s anxieties focalized in 1871, when the Contemporary Review published a pseudonymous article by Thomas Maitland (Robert Buchanan), who attacked Rossetti as a leader of a school of poets of sensual lust: “he is fleshly all over, from the roots of his hair to the tip of his toes.” Though a minor poet, Buchanan’s review upset Rossetti. Rossetti replied with an article in the Athenaeum, “The Stealthy School of Criticism,” and Buchanan then expanded his views for publication under his own name in the spring of 1872 as The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day.

William Michael Rossetti wrote of the effect of the attack on his brother in his memoir, “It is a simple fact that, from the time when the pamphlet had begun to work into the inner tissue of his feelings, Dante Rossetti was a changed man, and so continued till the close of his life.” In an atmosphere of Victorian prudery, it was not unreasonable to fear harm from such a pamphlet, though most of Rossetti's poetic predecessors and contemporaries, Tennyson, Robert Browning , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Morris, and Swinburne , had survived worse reviews. Almost all the reviews of Rossetti's 1870 Poems were favorable, and the book had sold unusually well (four editions in 1870). More directly, Rossetti may also have feared public exposure of his relationship with Jane Morris. In any case, after leaving Kelmscott on 2 June 1872, Rossetti suffered a complete mental breakdown. He was taken to the Roehampton home of his friend Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, where he attempted to commit suicide (as had Lizzie) with an overdose of laudanum.

He then spent the summer under the care of friends and associates. However, by 1873, Rossetti’s poetic productivity had revived, and he finished seven single sonnets and the double sonnet “The Sun's Shame.” The sonnets of this period are melancholy and resonant, but the familiar themes of suffused passion have begun to merge with new ones—the creation of art and intimations of immortality. Rossetti also continued to paint steadily, using Jane Morris as a model, though she was absent more and more frequently. Rossetti eventually left Kelmscott, where they had been staying together, for Chelsea. There his health continued to decline. Jane's letters of the mid-1870s indicate a decline in her own health; she found it difficult to sit and suffered from faints. Rossetti's phobias and increasingly paranoid suspicions may also have contrasted more and more unfavorably with William Morris's energy, prosperity, affectionate goodwill, and attentive concern for the Morrises' children.

Rossetti suffered further breakdowns in 1877 and 1879, though a last surge of poetic energy in 1880 and 1881 anticipated the publication of his poems in 1881. In this edition, he added six sonnets to “The House of Life,” completed seventeen more sonnets and short poems, revised “ Sister Helen ,” finished “The White Ship,” and wrote a carefully developed historical ballad, “The King's Tragedy.” The final sonnets and short poems reflect on the nature and source of art, as in the famous introductory sonnet to “The House of Life”: A Sonnet is a moment's monument,— Memorial from the Soul's eternity To one dead deathless hour. ............................... A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals The soul,—its converse, to what Power 'tis due:— Whether for tribute to the august appeals Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue, It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath, In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death.

In 1881 Rossetti sold one of his largest and best paintings, Dante's Dream, to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Although his volumes of Poems and Ballads and Sonnets (1881) were quietly but favorably received, he had entered a final pattern of depressive ill health. A sudden decline in February 1882 caused him to move to Birchington, where he revised the comic poem Jan Van Hunks, was visited by his mother, William, and Christina, and died of blood poisoning from uric acid on 9 April 1882. At his death he left behind the almost completed “Joan of Arc” and “Salutation of Beatrice.” Many of Rossetti's self-estimates were accurate. Had he been able when young to choose a literary career, he would probably have been a better poet than painter; he was a genuinely original and skillful writer. In part, his achievement was vicarious: he galvanized others in many ways not easily measured. However, insecurity and self-reproach manifested themselves in all but his earliest poems.

Rossetti was haunted by a (perhaps partially accurate) private assessment of his weaknesses as a painter and obsessed with Jane Morris as a model. Yet he was perhaps right that his intense response to such private archetypes was the chief distinction of his work. But it would be wrong to sentimentalize Rossetti as a victim of “tragic loves.” It seemed to serve some inner purpose for Rossetti to idealize women who were withdrawn, invalid, and/or melancholic. Their genuine alienation seems to have provided some counterpart for an inner sense of inadequacy and isolation in him. In some way he seemed to need serious emotional attachments with women poised on the edge of withdrawal. In any case, a sense of this equilibration heightened the effects both of his paintings and of his poetry. Critics have differed in assessing the quality of Rossetti's poetic achievement and in their preferences for different periods of his work. However, it is difficult to date Rossetti's work or divide it into periods, since he continually revised poems begun as a young man.

The texts to many early poems—”The Blessed Damozel,” “Sister Helen,” “The Burden of Nineveh,” “ The Portrait ,” “ Jenny ,” “Dante at Verona,” and several of the sonnets—gradually became near-palimpsests. Though concerned with many of the same themes over the course of his career—idealized, fleeting love and disappointment—in Rossetti's middle and later poetry, sexual love became a near-desperate desire to transcend time. Passion's benefit is not pleasure or mutual relaxation but a poignant hope that one moment may endure. This shift brought radical changes in themes and style and makes it somewhat difficult to compare Rossetti's achievement with that of other Victorian poets. For its modest size, Rossetti's poetic work is wide in manner and subject. He was a talented experimenter, and his heightened rhythms and refrains influenced other mid-and late-century poetry. He was also an important popularizer of Italian poetry in England and a major practitioner of the sonnet. His erotic spiritually and gift for the dramatic were his own, and poets from Swinburne to Wilde benefited from the liberating influence of his example.

Rossetti's attempt to create a unified oeuvre of poetry and painting was also pioneering and extended conceptions of both arts. Rossetti also had an indirect influence on the literature of the Decadence. He conceived the idea of the Germ, the first little magazine of literature and art, and with Brown, Morris, Burne-Jones, and Webb helped cofound the movement to extend the range of decorative art and improve the quality of book design. It would be difficult to imagine later nineteenth-century Victorian poetry and art without Rossetti's influence. His writings can perhaps best be viewed as an unusually acute expression of Victorian social uncertainty and loss of faith. Rossetti's poetry on the absence of love is as bleakly despairing as any of the century, and no poet of his period conveyed more profoundly certain central Victorian anxieties: metaphysical uncertainty, sexual anxiety, and fear of time. Neurotic Poets - Dante Gabriel Rossetti Neurotic Poets Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 - 1882) Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti was born in London on May 12, 1828 to an English mother and Italian father.

His mother, Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori was the sister of Byron's physician John Polidori, who had committed suicide at a young age. His father, Gabriele, was a literary scholar who was obsessed with the works of Dante and spoke mainly in Italian. Young Gabriel therefore spoke Italian as well as English from a very early age. When he was born, Gabriel already had an older sister Maria. His younger brother William and sister Christina were the next additions to the family. Early on, Rossetti demonstrated literary and artistic talent and aspirations. One family legend has it that in 1834 a local milkman was amazed as he watched six-year old Gabriel creating a drawing of a rocking horse. In 1841, Rossetti entered the Sass's Academy art school, a preparatory school for the art academy. He soon grew tired of the grinding, repetitive exercises and often just stayed at home to paint what he desired. Gabriel entered the Royal Academy Antique school in 1846, but found it just as dull as Sass's. What's more, his growing interest in and talent for poetry sometimes left him indecisive over which path to follow -- was he mainly a poet or a painter?

He had, by this time, translated several volumes of Italian poetry into English, corresponded with various poets and writers, and had started developing what would become some of his most famous poems. By 1848, he left the Academy to study under the painter Ford Maddox Brown. In the late summer or early autumn of that year, Rossetti and six other artists, including William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais met to form a "secret society" called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This group sought a return to a pre-Renaissance style of painting emphasizing symbolism, purity and simplicity. The youths often acted as models for each other, as well as offering a network of support and encouragement. The mysterious initials "P.R.B." served as a signature to their works. It was around this time that Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti started using the name he is more familiarly known by: Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti's first major painting, , appeared in 1849. His sister Christina had modeled as the Virgin, and his mother as St. Anne. “ Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell.

” ~ Rossetti in 'A Superscription' ~ One of the Pre-Raphaelite Brothers "discovered" a beautiful milliner's assistant, Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, in a London shop in 1849. Elizabeth, or "Lizzie" as she was nicknamed, soon began modeling for the artists in the group, and her image consequently appears in several PRB paintings. To model for Millais' Ophelia , she had to lie fully clothed in a tub of water for hours at a time. The water was kept warm by heating lamps, but one day when the lamps went out and the water grew colder and colder, Lizzie didn't complain nor move a muscle, for fear of disrupting the artist. Soon after this she caught a nasty cold, and Millais appropriately paid her doctor bills. One of Rossetti's more famous poems, The Blessed Damozel , first appeared in print in 1850. In 1852 Rossetti at last moved out of the family house and into his own rooms. By this time, he and Lizzie Siddal had established a close personal relationship, and they were often seen together.

Dante began calling Lizzie by his pet name for her: "Guggum". Their relationship continued over the years, although Lizzie's "frail" condition declined more and more, to the point where she started taking laudanum -- an alcoholic tincture of opium, widely used as medication in those days, but still quite addictive and dangerous -- to ease her pains. Rossetti and the waning Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood gained new disciples and renewed life in the mid-1850's. These initiates included Ned Jones (later Edward Burne-Jones), William Morris and Charles Algernon Swinburne. Two women who were to play an important role in the rest of Rossetti's life made their appearances in 1857. The first was Jane Burden, a dark-haired beauty whom the new Pre-Raphaelite group met in an Oxford theatre and persuaded to become a model. Jane later married William Morris. The second significant woman to enter Rossetti's life that year was Sarah Cox, better known as Fanny Cornforth. As a model, she appeared in some of Rossetti's paintings (such as Fazio's Mistress ).

As a friend to Rossetti, she would be around until the very end of his life. Sometime in late 1860 Rossetti married Lizzie at last. It was a private ceremony with no family or friends in attendance. On their honeymoon, Dante developed his drawing of the doppelgänger legend, titled How They Met Themselves . By Christmastime Lizzie was pregnant but, perhaps mainly due to her laudanum addiction, the baby girl was stillborn on May 2, 1861. This dealt a blow to an already fragile relationship, plunging Lizzie into depression and increasingly irrational behavior. On February 10, 1862, Rossetti arrived home from teaching to find his wife unconscious in bed, with an empty phial which had contained laudanum sitting on the nearby table. Attempts to revive her were unsuccessful, and she was pronounced dead the next morning. A week later, before her coffin was sealed to be taken to London's Highgate cemetery for burial, the grieving Rossetti secretly placed a bound notebook containing all the poems he was preparing for publication into her casket.

“ When vain desire at last and vain regret Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain, What shall assuage the unforgotten pain And teach the unforgetful to forget? ” ~ Rossetti in 'The One Hope' ~ Later that year Rossetti moved into the large "Tudor House" at 16 Cheyne Walk in London. Here, he began to create an environment into which he could withdraw from the world. Rossetti assembled a menagerie of exotic animals at the house -- from peacocks, raccoons, kangaroos and armadillos, to zebus, marmots, a brahmin bull and a wombat. In the house he kept mice, parrots, owls and woodchucks. The new stationary he had made up bore a seal with the motto "Frangas Non Flectas" (Break Not Bend), perhaps a reflection of his tendency to brood and worry over things too much rather than to let them lie. On the surface Rossetti may not have appeared a brooding widower, but he seemed to find no inner peace.

He was sometimes found in public as a stumbling drunk, his sensitivity to criticism of his image or his works increased, and he began to dabble in spiritualism, most often holding séances with the main purpose of contacting the spirit of his dead wife. After October of 1866, Rossetti rarely ventured out of his house in the daytime. He soon developed insomnia and what was a probably psychosomatic affliction of the eyes. Concern about his failing eyesight was perhaps what prompted him to turn back to poetry. Six years after Lizzie's burial, he tried to recall the poems from the buried manuscript. Finding himself unable to remember satisfactorily, he came up with a plan to remove the notebook from the coffin. This action would, of course, need to be kept strictly confidential because of its sensational nature. On October 5, 1869, a group of men traveled at night to Highgate Cemetery to remove the rotting notebook. It was delivered to Rossetti, who then copied the poems and destroyed the original. In 1870, eight years after her death, Rossetti completed his most famous portrayal of Lizzie Siddal: the painting .

In April, Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti was published and the book sold well. Rossetti eventually began feeling better physically; his insomnia and mysterious eye affliction disappeared. Rossetti and his circle were attacked by a critic in 1871 in an article titled "The Fleshly School of Poetry". Never one to take criticism well, Rossetti composed a reply against the advice of others. His article, "The Stealthy School of Criticism", only served to elevate the controversy and started a vicious public argument. Soon, his insomnia returned and he began to take doses of chloral hydrate washed down with whiskey (to cover the bad taste) to aid his sleep. After months of pressure and stress, Rossetti began having delusions and hallucinations. He was convinced that there was a conspiracy against him, and probably worried that the secret about the exhumed manuscript of poems had been leaked. On June 8, 1872 he attempted suicide by swallowing an entire bottle of laudanum. Comatose for several days, Rossetti was slowly nursed back to health by his good friends.

He spent the rest of the summer recovering as best as he could in Scotland, and resumed his work in September. He soon moved into Kelmscott Manor , home of William and Jane Morris, where he was to remain until 1874. He returned to his bad habits of sleeping half the day and staying up drinking and drugged most nights. While at Kelmscott he completed the paintings ) with Jane Morris as model. In a sonnet written to go with this painting, the erotic nature of the image is made clear: Her twofold girdle clasps the infinite boon Of bliss whereof the heaven and earth commune: And from her neck's inclining flower-stem lean Love-freighted lips and absolute eyes that wean The pulse of hearts to the spheres' dominant tune. Unfortunately, by 1879 Rossetti's chloral consumption was at an all-time high, and his depression was deepening. He became more of a recluse at Tudor House, and his friends rarely visited. After a slight recovery the following year, he produced what was to be his last major painting, The Day Dream , based upon an earlier sketch he'd made of Jane Morris sitting in a tree. “ ...

I shall not sink, I trust, so long as the poetic life wells up in me at intervals ... and so long as my painting still interests me.... ” ~ Rossetti in a letter, 1881 ~ By 1881 he was collecting old and new poems together for another publication. His volume Ballads and Sonnets appeared in the fall. It included the House of Life sequence, a collection of verses which were something of a reflection of Rossetti's life. Divided into two sections: Youth and Change , the series included philosophical poems rich in imagery such as The Choice Eat thou and drink; to-morrow thou shalt die. Surely the earth, that's wise being very old, Needs not our help. Then loose me, love, and hold Thy sultry hair up from my face; that I May pour for thee this golden wine, brim-high, Till round the glass thy fingers glow like gold, We'll drown all hours: thy song, while hours are toll'd, Shall leap, as fountains veil the changing sky. In December of 1881 Rossetti had a mild stroke which left him largely paralyzed.

He soon grew ill and, his physical decline caused his friends and family to fear that this was the end. Dante Gabriel Rossetti died on Easter Sunday (April 9) of 1882, and because he had firmly expressed that he did not want to be buried next to Lizzie in London, he was laid to rest in a churchyard near where he died in Birchington-On-Sea. Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series Book 39) The famous Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti was also a celebrated poet, scholar and translator, whose works influenced the European Symbolists, serving as a precursor of the Aesthetic movement. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats, whilst his later verses were characterised by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, as demonstrated by his masterpiece, the sonnet sequence, ‘The House of Life’. This volume of the bestselling Delphi Poets Series presents the complete written works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with beautiful illustrations, rare works and the usual Delph...

The House of Life (Illustrated): With twelve of Rossetti's finest art works The House of Life is a poetic work that spans the life and loves of the founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Exploring the passion and ardour he felt for his wife, and later the wife of his friend and business partner, William Morris, The House of Life is an exploration of self, existence and love. This edition features the beautiful oil paintings and pastel drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with an easy to navigate index of all the poems. Love it? Give it a 5* rating. Dante Gabriel Rossetti Artist Artist » Pre-Raphaelites (1848-1920) Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (English, 1828 пїЅ 1882) Dante Gabriel Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882) was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator.

He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was 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 influenced the European Symbolists, and he was also a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement. Rossetti's art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterised 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 wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) to Astarte Syriaca (1877), one of his last completed works. Rossetti's personal life was closely linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and muses Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, and Jane Morris.

Early life The son of émigré Italian scholar Gabriel Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti and his wife Frances Polidori, Rossetti was born in London, England and originally named Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti. His family and friends called him Gabriel, but in publications he put the name Dante first (in honour of Dante Alighieri). He was the brother of poet Christina Rossetti, the critic William Michael Rossetti, and author Maria Francesca Rossetti. The young Rossetti is described as "self-possessed, articulate, passionate and charismatic" but also "ardent, poetic and feckless". Like all his siblings, he aspired to be a poet and attended King's College School, Wimbledon. However, he also wished to be a painter, having shown a great interest in Medieval Italian art. He studied at Henry Sass's Drawing Academy from 1841 to 1845 when he enrolled at the Antique School of the Royal Academy, leaving in 1848. After leaving the Royal Academy, Rossetti studied under Ford Madox Brown, with whom he was to retain a close relationship throughout his life.

Following the exhibition of William Holman Hunt's painting The Eve of St. Agnes, Rossetti sought out Hunt's friendship. The painting illustrated a poem by the then still little-known John Keats. Rossetti's own poem "The Blessed Damozel" was an imitation of Keats, so he believed that Hunt might share his artistic and literary ideals. Together they developed the philosophy of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which they founded along with John Everett Millais. The group's intention was to reform English art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach first adopted by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo and the formal training regime introduced by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Their approach was to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art. The eminent critic John Ruskin later wrote: Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape background is painted to the last touch, in the open air, from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite figure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait of some living person.

For the first issue of the Brotherhood's magazine, The Germ, published early in 1850, Rossetti contribute his poem "The Blessed Damozel" and a story about a fictional early Italian artist inspired by a vision of a woman who bids him combine the human and the divine in his art. Rossetti was always more interested in the Medieval than in the modern side of the movement, working on translations of Dante and other Medieval Italian poets, and adopting the stylistic characteristics of the early Italians. Career Beginnings Rossetti's first major paintings in oil display the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. His Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850) both portray Mary as an emaciated and repressed teenage girl. William Bell Scott saw Girlhood in progress in Hunt's studio and remarked on young Rossetti's technique : He was painting in oils with water-colour brushes, as thinly as in water-colour, on canvas which he had primed with white till the surface was a smooth as cardboard, and every tint remained transparent. I saw at once that he was not an orthodox boy, but acting purely from the aesthetic motive.

The mixture of genius and dilettantism of both men shut me up for the moment, and whetted my curiosity. Stung by criticism of his second major painting, Ecce Ancilla Domini, exhibited in 1850, and the "increasingly hysterical critical reaction that greeted Pre-Raphaelitism" in that year, Rossetti turned to watercolours, which could be sold privately. Although his work subsequently won support from John Ruskin, Rossetti only rarely exhibited thereafter. Dante and Medievalism In 1850, Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal, an important early model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Over the next decade, she became his muse, his pupil, and his passion. They were finally married in 1860. Rossetti's incomplete picture Found, begun in 1853 and unfinished at his death, was his only major modern-life subject. It depicted a prostitute, lifted from the street by a country-drover who recognises his old sweetheart.

However, Rossetti increasingly preferred symbolic and mythological images to realistic ones, For many years, Rossetti worked on English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova (published as The Early Italian Poets in 1861). These and Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur inspired his art of the 1850s. He created his own method of painting in watercolours, using thick pigments mixed with gum to give rich effects similar to medieval illuminations. He also developed a novel drawing technique in pen-and-ink. His first published illustration was "The Maids of Elfen-Mere" (1855), for a poem by his friend William Allingham, and he contributed two illustrations to Edward Moxon's 1857 edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Poems as well as illustrations for works by his sister Christina Rossetti. His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.

Neither Burne-Jones nor Morris knew Rossetti personally, but both were much influenced by his works, and met him by recruiting him as a contributor to their Oxford and Cambridge Magazine which Morris founded in 1856 to promote their ideas about art and poetry. In February 1857, Rossetti wrote to William Bell Scott: Two young men, projectors of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, have recently come up to town from Oxford, and are now very intimate friends of mine. Their names are Morris and Jones. They have turned artists instead of taking up any other career to which the university generally leads, and both are men of real genius. Jones's designs are marvels of finish and imaginative detail, unequalled by anything unless perhaps Albert Dürer's finest works. That summer Morris and Rossetti visited Oxford and finding the new Oxford Union debating-hall under construction, pursued a commission to paint the upper walls with scenes from Le Morte d'Arthur and to decorate the roof between the open timbers. Seven artists were recruited, among them Valentine Prinsep and Arthur Hughes, and the work was hastily begun. The frescoes, done too soon and too fast, began to fade at once and now are barely decipherable.

Rossetti recruited two sisters, Bessie and Jane Burden, as models for the Oxford Union murals, and Jane became Morris's wife in 1859. A new direction Around 1860, Rossetti returned to oil painting, abandoning the dense medieval compositions of the 1850s in favour of powerful close-up images of women in flat pictorial spaces characterized by dense colour. These paintings were to be a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement. In these works, Rossetti's depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He tended to portray his new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism, whilst Jane Burden, the wife of his business partner William Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess. "As in Rossetti's previous reforms, the new kind of subject appeared in the context of a wholesale reconfiguration of the practice of painting, from the most basic level of materials and techniques up to the most abstract or conceptual level of the meanings and ideas that can be embodied in visual form." These new works were based not on medievalism, but on the Italian High Renaissance artists of Venice, Titian and Veronese.

In 1861, Rossetti became a founding partner in the decorative arts firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with Morris, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, Philip Webb, Charles Faulkner and Peter Paul Marshall. Rossetti contributed designs for stained glass and other decorative objects. Rossetti's wife Elizabeth Siddal died of an overdose of laudanum in 1862, shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and upon the death of his beloved Lizzie, buried the bulk of his unpublished poems with her at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them dug back up. He idealised her image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as Beata Beatrix. Cheyne Walk years After the death of his wife in 1862, Rossetti leased Tudor House at number 16 Cheyne Walk, along the Thames in London, he lived for the next twenty years surrounded by extravagant furnishings and a parade of exotic birds and animals.

Rossetti was fascinated with wombats, frequently asking friends to meet him at the "Wombat's Lair" at the London Zoo in Regent's Park, and spending hours there himself. Finally, in September 1869, he was to acquire the first of two pet wombats. This short-lived wombat, named "Top", was often brought to the dinner table and allowed to sleep in the large centrepiece during meals. This fascination with exotic animals continued throughout Rossetti's life, finally culminating in the purchase of a llama and a Toucan which Rossetti would dress in a cowboy hat and persuade to ride the llama round the dining table for his amusement. Rossetti maintained Fanny Cornforth (described delicately by William Allington as Rossetti's "housekeeper") in her own establishment nearby in Chelsea, and painted many voluptuous images of her between 1863 and 1865. In 1865 he discovered auburn-haired Alex Wilding, a dressmaker and would-be actress who was engaged to model for him on a full-time basis and sat for The Blessed Damozel and other paintings of the period.

Jane Morris, whom Rossetti had found as a model for the Oxford Union murals he painted with William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones in 1857, also sat for him during these years, and she soon "consumed and obessed him in paint, poetry, and life". In 1869, Morris and Rossetti rented a country house, Kelmscott Manor at Kelmscott, Oxfordshire, as a summer home, but it soon became a retreat for Rossetti and Jane Morris to have a long-lasting and complicated liaison. The two spent summers there, with the Morris children, while Morris himself traveled to Iceland in 1871 and 1873. During these years, Rossetti was prevailed upon by friends, in particular Charles Augustus Howell, to exhume his poems from his wife's grave. This he did, collating and publishing them in 1870 in the volume Poems by D. G. Rossetti. They created a controversy when they were attacked as the epitome of the "fleshly school of poetry". The eroticism and sensuality of the poems caused offence.

One poem, "Nuptial Sleep", described a couple falling asleep after sex. This was part of Rossetti's sonnet sequence The House of Life, a complex series of poems tracing the physical and spiritual development of an intimate relationship. Rossetti described the sonnet form as a "moment's monument", implying that it sought to contain the feelings of a fleeting moment, and to reflect upon their meaning. The House of Life was a series of interacting monuments to these moments — an elaborate whole made from a mosaic of intensely described fragments. This was Rossetti's most substantial literary achievement. In 1881, Rossetti published a second volume of poems, Ballads and Sonnets, which included the remaining sonnets from The House of Life sequence. Decline and death The savage reaction of critics to Rossetti's first collection of poetry contributed to a mental breakdown in June 1872, and although he joined Jane at Kelmscott that September, he "spent his days in a haze of chloral and whisky" The next summer he was much improved, and both Alexa Wilding and Jane Morris sat to him at Kelmscott, he created a soulful series of dream-like portraits.

In 1874, Morris reorganized his decorative arts firm, cutting Rossetti out of the business, and the polite fiction that both men were in residence with Jane at Kelmscott could not be maintained. Rossetti abruptly left Kelmscott in July 1874 and never returned. Toward the end of his life, he sank into a morbid state, darkened by his drug addiction to chloral hydrate and increasing mental instability. He spent his last years as a recluse at Cheyne Walk. On Easter Sunday, 1882, he died at the country house of a friend, he had gone in yet another vain attempt to recover his health, which had been destroyed by chloral as his wife's had been destroyed by laudanum. He is buried at Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, England. His grave is visited regularly by admirers of his life's work and achievements and this can be seen by fresh flowers placed there regularly. Collections and critical assessment Tate Britain, Birmingham, Manchester and Salford Museum and Art Galleries all contain large collections of Rossetti's work; the latter was bequeathed a number of works following the death of L.S.

Lowry in 1976. Lowry was president of the Newcastle-based 'Rossetti Society', which was founded in 1966. Lowry's private collection of works was chiefly built around Rossetti's paintings and sketches of Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris, and notable pieces included Pandora, Proserpine and a drawing of Annie Miller. In an interview with Mervyn Levy, Lowry explained his fascination with the Rossetti women in relation to his own work: "I don't like his women at all, but they fascinate me, like a snake. That's why I always buy Rossetti whenever I can. His women are really rather horrible. It's like a friend of mine who says he hates my work, although it fascinates him." The friend Lowry referred to was businessman Monty Bloom, to whom he also explained his obsession with Rossetti's portraits: "They are not real women They are dreams He used them for something in his mind caused by the death of his wife.

I may be quite wrong there, but significantly they all came after the death of his wife." The popularity, frequent reproduction, and general availability of Rossetti's later paintings of women have led to this association with "a morbid and langourous sensuality" His small-scale early works and drawings are less well known, but it is in these that his originality, technical inventiveness, and significance in the movement away from Academic tradition can best be seen. As Roger Fry wrote in 1916, "Rossetti more than any other artist since Blake may be hailed as a forerunner of the new ideas" in English Art. 2 February, 2009 / Hits: 11838 / Print Search 1000+ images about Dante Gabriel Rossetti on Pinterest | Museum of art, William morris and Christina rossetti Dante Gabriel Rossetti Sketch of Jane Morris (wife of William Morris) from website for research on Rossetti. See More The Day Dream | Rossetti, Dante Gabriel | V&A Search the Collections Download PDF version The sitter for this painting was Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris, who often posed for Rossetti.

At the time this was painted Rossetti was involved in an illicit love affair with Jane. He shows her sitting in the branches of a sycamore tree and holding a sprig of honeysuckle. This sweet-smelling climbing plant symbolised the bonds of love for the Victorians, and Rossetti may have included it here as a subtle reference to the relationship between artist and model. Rossetti was also a poet, and the title relates to his poem of the same name which ends: She dreams; till now on her forgotten book Drops the forgotten blossom from her hand. Physical description The Day Dream, oil on canvas, 158.7 x 92.7 cm.

Place of Origin Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, born 1828 - died 1882 (painter (artist)) Materials and Techniques oil on canvas Dimensions Height: 158.7 cm estimate, Width: 92.7 cm estimate, Height: 195.3 cm frame, Width: 128.8 cm frame Object history note Commissioned by Constantine Alexander Ionides for 700 guineas (£735) by 31 October 1879, CAI.3 was finished by December 1880 (cf. letters from the artist to C. A. Ionides between 31 October 1879 and late 1880 in the N.A.L [MSL./1979/2601/1-5] and from the artist to C. A. I dated 15 September and 9 December 1880, private collection). The work is listed in Ionides' inventory of November 1881 as 'Day Dream' by D.G.

Rossetti with a valuation of £800; Constantine Alexander Ionides, by whom bequeathed in 1900. Historical significance: Rossetti's last finished work, to which he gave great attention, considering the numerous letters he sent to his patron while executing the painting. He was confident with the quality of the painting, and wrote to Ionides on 18 march 1880: 'I am glad to say it is far advanced & will be beyond question as good a thing as I ever did.' (National Art Library, 86.WW.1 MSL/1979/2601/2) Rossetti was very directive concerning the way the work should be exhibited in Ionides' home: 'The picture itself need not stand more than a foot at very utmost from the ground, to be seen to advantage by a seated person. (...)The picture should slope forward (...). It should be as far away from the white dado as possible, & the stand not made light but dark. The picture cannot help looking dull otherwise, though it is very brilliant if it gets a chance.

It ought to stand with the light from the left of spectator, as here, otherwise it will lose in effect.' (undated letter, private collection). Descriptive line Oil on canvas, 'The Day Dream', Dante Gabriel Rossetti, England, 1880 Bibliographic References (Citation, Note/Abstract, NAL no) Baker, Malcolm and Richardson, Brenda, eds. A Grand Design : The Art of the Victoria and Albert Museum. London: V&A Publications, 1997. 431 p., ill. ISBN 1851773088. C. J. H., 'The Constantine Alexander Ionides Bequest', article 1, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, vol. 5, n. 17 (August 1904), p. 456. Doughty, Oswald, A Victorian Romantic: Dante-Gabriel Rossetti, London, 1949, p. 619. 100 Great Paintings in The Victoria & Albert Museum. London: V&A, 1985, p.178 Treuherz, Julian, Elisabeth Prettejohn and Edwin Becker.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. exh.cat. London; New York, N.Y.: Thames & Hudson, 2003, p. 216, cat. no. 154 Materials Jane Morris: An Enigmatic Muse • Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood Jane Morris: An Enigmatic Muse Drawing of Jane Morris by Dante Gabriel Rossetti In 1857, Rossetti and a small group of artists that included William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones were working in Oxford, painting the Union Murals. One night, they attended a performance put on by actors from the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Seated in the gallery below were Jane Burden and her sister. Rossetti, struck by Jane’s appearance , asked her right away to pose for the murals. She did not show up, probably being wary of Rossetti’s proposal. After later seeing Burne-Jones by chance, she agreed to model and a Pre-Raphaelite star was born. Jane posed mainly for Gabriel at first as his main model and muse, Lizzie Siddal , was away at the time.

Gabriel was soon called away to join Lizzie, who was often ill and had possibly heard through the grapevine about Rossetti’s new model. Jane then began to sit for William Morris. Morris was a great admirer of Rossetti’s – he looked upon him as a mentor and it seems hero worship may have been a dynamic of their friendship. La Donna Della Finestra, painted by Rossetti Morris was quite interested in Arthurian legend and chivalry. He began to paint Jane as Queen Guenevere and it is said that while she posed for him, Morris had written on the back of the canvas “I cannot paint you, but I love you” — a shy, sweet, romantic gesture. By all accounts, Jane was probably in love with Rossetti from the beginning, but he was already betrothed to Siddal. So Jane found herself engaged and eventually married to William Morris. The home of William and Jane Morris, The Red House , is famous for its architecture and for the collaborative efforts used to decorate it –decorations which led to the Arts and Crafts movement .

Both William and Jane, as well as Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Elizabeth Siddal and others worked together painting murals, creating furniture, tapestries, and other artistic masterpieces. Jane and William had two children, Jenny and May. Jane Morris Her affair with Dante Gabriel Rossetti after his wife died is infamous. She began to pose for Rossetti again in 1865, which began a series of Rossetti masterpieces familiar to many Pre-Raphaelite enthusiasts. He painted her repeatedly until his death. Due to Rossetti’s possible hydrocele, their affair may not have been as physical as many believe, however, the physicality is immaterial. They were definitely intimate emotionally and it was incredibly painful for William Morris. In order to keep the affair a private matter, Morris and Rossetti entered into a joint tenancy of Kelmscott Manor. Rossetti captured something in his paintings. Was it her? Or some element in his own mind that her face inspired? She appears enigmatic and brooding with an almost inscrutable quality. The works are not to everyone’s taste and I frequently read criticism of Jane’s features on canvas. I happen to love them.

She’s strong and fierce and beautiful. Astarte Syriaca, Dante Gabriel Rossetti In viewing actual photographs of Jane, it is obvious that Rossetti glamorized her a great deal. I have to wonder how she felt about this. How did she feel when she saw a painted version of herself? On canvas, she seems quiet and contemplative. A mystery. Perhaps she was a mystery even to Rossetti. Reverie, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti ‘I cannot say that Rossetti’s presence was enlivening [in his later years]. My most representative recollection of him is of his sitting beside Mrs. Morris, who looked as if she had stepped out of any one of his pictures, both wrapped in a motionless silence as of a world where they would have no need of words. And silence, however poetically golden, was a sin in a poet whose voice in speech was so musical as his – hers I am sure I never heard.’ R.E.

Francillon, Mid-Victorian Memories Rival to Lizzie Siddal, mistress to Rossetti and wife to William Morris, the fascinating life of Pre-Raphaelite muse Jane Burden revealed | Daily Mail Online comments She was the famous beauty who captured the heart of one of the UK's best-loved artists but unlike her contemporary, Lizzie Siddal, few remember Jane Burden today. And yet, the story of Jane Burden, later Morris, the beautiful stablehand's daughter who went on to appear in some of the world's most famous paintings, is just as fascinating. Now the tale of the model and muse, who died exactly 100 years ago, is the subject of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, due to run until May. Muse: Jane proved irresistible to the Pre-Raphaelite painters, including Rossetti who painted this 1881 portrait Janey Morris: A Pre-Raphaelite Muse charts her rags-to-riches journey and includes some of the incredible works of art she appeared in. Many were by her lover, husband William Morris' close friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose other muse was his wife, the flame-haired Lizzie Siddal.

RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share Although Morris didn't share Siddal's tawny colouring, she did match her for beauty and frequently appeared as a goddess, whether Proserpine [Persephone] or Astarte, in Rossetti's work. Her husband, meanwhile, chose to portray her as King Arthur's famously beautiful - and famously unfaithful - Queen Guinevere in an 1858 painting that also goes by the title La Belle Iseult. Other artists to work with Morris included Edward Burne-Jones, who immortalised her likeness in a succession of stained glass windows, and Evelyn de Morgan; one of the few female Pre-Raphaelite painters. Beauty: Morris as Astarte Syriaca, the Middle Eastern deity, and in Rossetti's Day Dream (right) Family: Jane, second from right, sits between her two daughters and in front of her husband William Morris THE PRE-RAPHAELITES EXPLAINED The Pre-Raphelites were a group of English artists who formed a 'brotherhood' in 1848, dedicated to creating work that rejected the mannered approach adopted by Raphael and other Renaissance painters.

Believing Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo had proven a corrupting influence on art, they wanted to return to the intense colour and detailed compositions that characterised 15th century Italian art. Founded by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the trio later welcomed Rossetti's brother, William, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner to their circle. So who was Jane Morris? Like Siddal, her rival in both love and art, little is known of her childhood other than that it was poor and deprived. Born on the 19th October 1839 in Oxford, Morris was the daughter of a stableman, Robert Burden, and his laundress wife Ann Maizey. Although she was undoubtedly beautiful, she seemed destined for a life of obscurity until a chance encounter with a group of artists outside a theatre at the age of 18 changed her life forever. Edward Burne-Jones and Gabriel Dante Rossetti were in Oxford to complete work on a mural for John Ruskin, then the UK's leading art critic and the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University.

Spotting her outside Oxford's Drury theatre, the pair were enraptured by her beauty and Morris' modelling career began. Morris, for her part, was smitten by Rossetti but he, at the time engaged to Lizzie Siddal, didn't reciprocate. Instead, she became engaged to his friend, William Morris, whom she met through Rossetti and sat for on several occasions. Lovers: Rossetti (left) and Jane, seen in a study for Astarte Syriaca, were lovers after the death of Siddal Ethereal: Rossetti's 1850 work, The Bower Meadow, includes a depiction of Jane Morris (left) Family: Jane's long-suffering husband William Morris (left) and their younger daughter, Mary (May) The pair married in 1859 and went on to have two daughters, Jane and Mary, with whom they lived in the beautiful Kelmscott Manor on the Gloucestershire-Oxfordshire border.

Despite her humble background, the new Mrs Morris had few problems fitting into upper class society, refining her accent to the point where friends described it as 'queenly' and later inspiring Vernon Lee's 1884 novel Miss Brown, which in turn inspired the musical and film, My Fair Lady. But although she and Morris appear to have been happy, Rossetti remained in the background and after Siddal's death, their affair began in earnest. The relationship would last, off and on, until his death in 1882, and she would go on to star in some of his most famous works. After his death, she embarked on an affair with poet and political activist Wilfred Scawen Blunt that endured until 1894. Later life: These photographs were taken in 1898, after she was widowed, at Kelmscott Manor He was her last love. Just two years after her relationship with Blunt ended, her husband died and Jane, left white-haired by the trauma of nursing him through his final illness, would remain alone for the rest of her life.

She would outlive her husband by 16 years, eventually dying peacefully at the age of 75 in her bed on 26th January 1914 in Bath. Muse, model and romantic, Jane's death might have been a conventional one but her life was anything but. Janey Morris: Pre-Raphaelite Muse runs until the 11th May at the National Portrait Gallery

Question: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's mistress, Jane Burden, was the wife of which artist and poet?
Answer: William MORRIS