Dante Gabriel Rossetti
DGR, or, to give hi his baptismal name, Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, was born in London.
But his parentage was almost entirely Italian. His father, Gabriel Rossetti, was an itlian refugee,
exiled from his native country for his connection with the Liberal movement at Naples. He
settled in London about 1824, and married Frances Polidori, who was half Italian half English.
Gabriele Rossetti obtained an appointment as Professor of Italian at King´s College; he devoted
his leisure to the sudy of the Divine Comedy , and is remembered by two or tree unique
volumens of comment on his great countryman.
DGR was born on the 12th of May 1828, at 38 Charlotte St, Portland Place. He was sent
first to a private school in Foley St, but his edcation was recieved principally at King´s College.
From an early age he evinced a natural inclination towards painting, and on leaving school in
1843 joined Cary´s Art Academy in Bloomsbury, among whose pupils was John Everett Millais:
subsequently he studied at the Royal Academy, though he never procedeed beyond its antique
section. About this time Rossetti saw and greatly admired the paintings of Ford Maddox Brown.
Tired of Academy technicalities and hoping to find a royal road to painting, he wrote asking to
be admited to Maddox Brown´s studio as a pupil. Maddox Brown took him with out fee, but
much to his disappointment set him to work on “pickle-pots” and “still life”. Rossetti left after
a few months to share a studio with Holman Hunt. In 1849, his first picture, “The Girlhood of
Mary Virgin” was exhibited at the Free Exhibition in a gakkery at Hyde Park Corner, and
purchased by the Marchioness of Bath for 80 pounds (money). It is a picture of high merit, and
a admirable example of his early art. He seldom exhibited again, but just before his death
“Dante´s Dream,” regarded by Sir Noel Paton as among the half-dozen supreme pictures of the
world, was exhibited at Bristol.
Rossetti had displayed a youthful bent for writing as well as painting, an at about 12
years of age had written a poem, Sir Hugh the Heron, wich was privately printed by his
grandfather. A copy still survives in the British Museum. He sent poems to Leigh Hunt with a
request for advise. Leigh Hunt dissuaded him from adopting poetry as a profession as “too
pitiable to be chosen in cool blood.” But side by side with his art studies he had cultivated his
poetical faculties. While he was still under age he composed The Blessed Damozel, and My
Sister´s Sleep. In 1848, Rossetti, with Millais, Holdman Hunt, and the sculptor Thomas Woolner
as the leading spirits, formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the object being, according to
Ruskin, “to Paint nature as it is around them with the help pf modern science.”In the pages of te
short-lived periodical, the Germ, four numbers of which appeared in 1850, the qualities and
limitations of the Pre-Raphaelite school were well set forth. Rossetti himsef contributed The
Blessed Damozel and the beautiful prose poem Hand and Soul.
In 1856 Rossetti wrote a little, including “The Burden of Nineveh,” for the Oxford and
Cambridge Magazine, which was the practical outcome of the Germ. The contests of the present
volumen indeed are taken from these two publications. In the spring of 1860, after a long
engagement, he married Elisabeth Eleanor Siddal, the daughter of a Sheffield cutler, a gifted and
beautiful woman who was the model for many of his best known pictures. It was during his
short married life that he published his first volumen, which consisted of translations, called
“The Early Italian Poems,” and now known as “Dante and his Circle”. In 1862, two years after
his marriage, Mrs Rosseti took and overdose of laudanum and died. Overwhelmed with grief at
her loss, her husband buried in her coffin the MSS. Of a volumen of poetry which had for the
most part been inspired by her. Aboyt seven years later, yielding to the entreatry of his Friends,
Rosseti permitted the MSS. to be disinterred , and in 1870 his vollume called “Poems” was
published. Rossetti´s refusal to exhibit his pictures had piqued public curiosity, and the success
