Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Complete Story
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the poet painter at the heart of the Pre-Raphaelites, who filled his canvases with sensual, dreaming women framed by flowers and symbols. He was also a romantic disaster: a tangle of muses, obsession, drugs and one of the strangest stories in art, the night he buried his poems in his wife's coffin, then dug them back up.
Half his power is the painting, half is the myth he lived. With Rossetti the two are impossible to separate.
Born: London, 1828, into an Italian family
Known for: Pre-Raphaelite founder, sensual symbolic women, poetry
Died: Birchington on Sea, England, 1882
Founder and poet
In 1848 Rossetti helped found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with Millais and Holman Hunt. He was named after the Italian poet Dante, wrote fine poetry himself, and his pictures often illustrate verse, his own or others. See what is Pre-Raphaelite art.
Over time he moved away from sharp Pre-Raphaelite detail toward close up, jewel coloured women heavy with symbolism, a key influence on Symbolism.
The women in the frame
His paintings are dominated by a few faces. Lady Lilith and Proserpine show beautiful, dangerous women holding fruit, mirrors or flowers loaded with meaning. The sitters were the women he loved and obsessed over.
Chief among them was Elizabeth Siddal, model, artist and his wife, and later Jane Morris, the wife of his friend William Morris, with whom he had a long, painful attachment.
The buried poems
When Siddal died of a laudanum overdose in 1862, a grief stricken Rossetti slipped the only manuscript of his unpublished poems into her coffin. Years later, wanting to publish them, he had her grave secretly opened and the book retrieved. The poems came out, the story haunted him.
His final years were shadowed by depression and addiction to the sedative chloral, and by guilt over the women in his life.
A few things people ask about Rossetti
What is Dante Gabriel Rossetti famous for?
Co founding the Pre-Raphaelites and painting sensual, symbolic women like Proserpine and Lady Lilith.
Was he also a writer?
Yes, a notable poet as well as a painter.
Did he really exhume his poems?
Yes, from his wife Elizabeth Siddal's grave, years after burying them with her.
Why Rossetti still fascinates
Rossetti made the muse the whole subject of art, and lived a life as feverish as his pictures. His dreaming women shaped everything from Symbolism to modern fantasy illustration, and his story still reads like a gothic novel.
A final detail. He kept a small private zoo at his London house, including wombats, which he adored. When a pet wombat died he drew himself weeping over it, mixing real grief with his usual theatrical flair.