Dante Gabriel Rossetti Biography

Dante Gabriel Rossetti helped found the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a school of painting (1848) that advocated a return to the Italian style before Raphael.

Rossetti was also a well-known romantic poet and was famous for lyric poems such as The Blessed Damozel.

A charismatic and gifted artist but a lousy student, he made his splash in the late 1840s and early 1850s, with portraits and, especially, scenes inspired by Dante.

With William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, Rossetti formed the core of the Pre-Raphaelites, but he abandoned those artistic principles by 1860 and became known for his portraits of beautiful women in luxurious detail.

Rossetti married Elizabeth “Lizzie” Siddall in 1860. She had been a model for the pre-Raphaelites and had been Rossetti’s model throughout the 1850s. A poet and sketch artist in her own right, Siddall (later shortened to Siddal) died of an overdose of laudanum in 1862.

His muse and model after Siddall’s death was Jane Burden, the wife of William Morris, with whom Rossetti had a love affair in the late 1860s, before he spiraled into depression and paranoia.