Rossetti, Dante Gabriel

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English painter and poet. He was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) in 1848. As well as romantic medieval scenes, he produced many idealized portraits of women, including the Beata Beatrix (1864). His verse includes ‘The Blessed Damozel’ (1850). His sister was the poet Christina Rossetti.

He formed the PRB with the painters John Everett Millais and Holman Hunt but produced only two deliberately Pre-Raphaelite pictures, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850), both in the Tate Gallery, London. Afterwards he refused to exhibit, and developed a broader style and a personal subject matter, related to his poetry. He was a friend of the critic John Ruskin, who helped establish his reputation as a painter, and of William Morris and his wife Jane, who became Rossetti's lover and the subject of much of his work. From 1857 to 1858 he worked on the Arthurian frescoes for the Oxford Union with Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, and initiated a second phase of Pre-Raphaelitism associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement.

His Poems (1870) were recovered from the grave of his wife Elizabeth Siddal (1834–1862), also a painter, whom he had married in 1860, and were attacked as being of ‘the fleshly school of poetry’.

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