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 Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed.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 :. | Writing on the Sand (mk28) | Aurea Catena | Ecce Ancilla Domini (The Annunciation) (mk28) | The Blue Bower (mk28) | Found (mk28) |
Related Artists:
Thomas Jones
Thomas Jones (26 September 1742 - 29 April 1803) was a British landscape painter. He was a pupil of Richard Wilson and was best known in his lifetime as a painter of Welsh and Italian landscapes in the style of his master. However, Jones's reputation grew in the 20th century when more unconventional works by him, ones not been intended for public consumption, came to light. Most notable among these is a series of views of Naples which he painted from 1782 to 1783. By breaking with the conventions of classical landscape painting in favour of direct observation, they look forward to the work of Camille Corot and the Barbizon School in the 19th century. His autobiography, Memoirs of Thomas Jones of Penkerrig, went unpublished until 1951 but is now recognised as a major work of commentary on the 18th-century art world.
Johan Thorn Prikker
1868-1932 Dutch Johan Thorn Prikker Gallery Dutch painter, printmaker, mosaicist and stained-glass artist. He attended the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague (1881-8). During this period he painted mainly landscapes in the style of The Hague school. Until c. 1896 he produced Symbolist works, in which the emphatic line flow and the subtle colour shading are especially noticeable, for example The Bride (1893; Otterlo, Kr?ller-M?ller). From 1892 until 1897 he corresponded with Henri Borel, partly about his Symbolist work, often drawing in the letters. During this time he came into close contact with Belgian artists, in particular with Henry Van de Velde through whom he was able to exhibit with Les XX in Brussels. In summer he regularly stayed in Vise, where he produced pastel drawings in a rhythmic pointillism, a style with which he could achieve a form of abstraction.
Valle Rosenberg
painted Sitting lady in 1913