English Pre-Raphaelite Painter, 1828-1882 Rossetti's first major paintings display some of the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. His Girlhood of Mary, Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini both portray Mary as an emaciated and repressed teenage girl. His incomplete picture Found was his only major modern-life subject. It depicted a prostitute, lifted up from the street by a country-drover who recognises his old sweetheart. However, Rossetti increasingly preferred symbolic and mythological images to realistic ones. This was also true of his later poetry. Many of the ladies he portrayed have the image of idealized Botticelli's Venus, who was supposed to portray Simonetta Vespucci. Although he won support from the John Ruskin, criticism of his clubs caused him to withdraw from public exhibitions and turn to waterhum, which could be sold privately. In 1861, Rossetti published The Early Italian Poets, a set of English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova. These, and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, inspired his art in the 1850s. His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired his new friends of this time, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Rossetti also typically wrote sonnets for his pictures, such as "Astarte Syraica". As a designer, he worked with William Morris to produce images for stained glass and other decorative devices. Both these developments were precipitated by events in his private life, in particular by the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal. She had taken an overdose of laudanum shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed. He idealised her image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as Beata Beatrix. These paintings were to be a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement. In these works, Rossetti's depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He tended to portray his new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism, whilst another of his mistresses Jane Burden, the wife of his business partner William Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess.  Related Paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti :. | The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (mk28) | The infancy of Maria | Ecce Ancilla Domini! | The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Paradise | The Annunciation |
Related Artists:
William Pitt
fl.1853-1890
Kate Elizabeth Bunce
English Pre-Raphaelite Painter, 1856-1927
Jan Boeckhorst
Born in Westphalia, in either Menster or Rees, Boeckhorst moved to Antwerp around 1626. He had a close relationship with Rubens's studio, finishing paintings designed by that master as well as assisting with large series such as the joyous entry of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand in 1635 and the Torre de la Parada. He also collaborated as a figure painter in landscapes and still lifes by Jan Wildens and Frans Snyders, and sometimes painted lively group portraits.[1] He traveled to Italy in the years 1635-1639 and joined the Bentvueghels with the nickname Lange Jan (Tall John). Cornelis de Bie, in his Gulden Cabinet der Edel Vry Schilderconst (The Golden Cabinet of the Honourable Free Art of Painting; 1662), remarks that Boeckhorst was a student of Jordaens. Works in that master's style include large genre paintings of the 1640s such as Peasants going to Market (Antwerp, Rubenshuis), which also acts as an allegory of the four elements. In the 1650s and 1660s Boeckhorst painted altarpieces for churches throughout Flanders and designed cartoons for tapestries.