74 Biography: Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Portrait of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Artist | William Holman Hunt Source | Wikimedia Commons License | Public Domain
(1828-1882)
D. G. Rossetti was born into an intellectual family; his father was a Dante scholar, and his mother, a trained governess. D. G. Rossetti trained as both a painter and poet, studying painting with Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893), the father of novelist Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939). He and fellow artists founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, and Rossetti published several of his poems in its journal The Germ (1850).
Artistic rebels, the Pre-Raphaelites stood for the artist’s vision of the truth regardless of convention. They countered the industrialization and mechanization of their era with an organicism they found in the Medieval era. They also sought fidelity to the visible world, often achieved through scrupulously-rendered minute detail. Their elaborate, realistic details were faithful to nature but also symbolic. Rossetti in particular made the non-visual—the spirit or details of religious myth—visible.
Rossetti married poet and painter Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862), who was also his model. After losing a child, she committed suicide. Out of remorse, Rossetti buried a manuscript of his poems in her grave. Later, he had her body exhumed to recover his poems. Rossetti’s reputation grew, and he was embraced by a second generation of Pre-Raphaelites—calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—particularly by William Morris, one of the most important figures in this second group.
The real love of Rossetti’s life was Jane Burden (1839-1914) who married Morris. Rossetti and Morris cofounded a firm of designers that responded to Ruskin’s adjuration to involve the whole human being in their work. Rossetti and Jane Morris conducted an affair—that was neither sanctioned nor condemned by Morris. Rossetti wrote his important sonnet sequence, House of Life, influenced by his love for Jane Morris. His poetry was brutally attacked by Robert Buchanan (18411901), who described Rossetti’s poetry as “fleshly”—a far from complimentary term during the Victorian era.
Rossetti, who was already addicted to chloral, suffered a nervous breakdown and a decline in his health. He managed to continue to write and paint until he died suddenly in 1882, leaving unfinished paintings behind.
This material is from British Literature II: Romantic Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond by Bonnie J. Robinson from the University System of Georgia, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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