Rossetti painted in oils with watercolour brushes and helped launch a rebellion
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, son of an Italian exile in London, co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 to overturn how English artists were trained. Poet as well as painter, he wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, and his later dreamy portraits of women helped pave the way for Symbolism and the Aesthetic movement.
He was born in London on 12 May 1828 into a bohemian household full of visiting Italian scholars and revolutionaries. His father was the émigré scholar Gabriele Rossetti; his mother, who schooled the children at home in Dante and Petrarch, was the sister of the writer John William Polidori. All four siblings wrote, among them the poet Christina Rossetti. Friends called him Gabriel, but he signed his work Dante, and as a teenager he discovered the medieval poet whose Vita Nuova he later translated.
After drawing school and the Royal Academy's Antique School, which he left in 1848, he studied with Ford Madox Brown. Admiring William Holman Hunt's picture of a Keats poem, he sought Hunt out, and with John Everett Millais they formed the Brotherhood. Their target was the mechanical style they traced to painters after Raphael and Michelangelo, and the academic regime set by Sir Joshua Reynolds; they wanted instead the crowded detail and vivid colour of fifteenth-century Italian and Flemish art, applying pure pigment over white grounds. William Bell Scott watched Rossetti paint The Girlhood of Mary Virgin thinly in oils using watercolour brushes, so that every tint stayed transparent.
Harsh reviews of his second major oil, Ecce Ancilla Domini, in 1850 drove him towards privately sold watercolours, and although John Ruskin later championed him, he seldom exhibited again. He devised a thick, gum-bound watercolour technique that mimicked medieval illumination, drew on Malory's Arthurian tales, and so inspired the young William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. In 1857 the three joined a scheme to paint Arthurian murals in the Oxford Union, done so fast they began fading at once. One of his models there, Jane Burden, married Morris in 1859.
From about 1860 his style grew dense and lush, typically a single woman framed by rich foliage. His life and art were intertwined with his muses, notably Elizabeth Siddal, whom he married, and Jane Morris. He died on 9 April 1882.
Source: Dante Gabriel Rossetti
