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 Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed.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 :. | Fazio's Mistress | The Bride | Monna Vanna | Found (mk28) | Waterfall in a Mountainous |
Related Artists:
Willem Romeijn
circa 1645-1694
Frederic Auguste Bartholdi
French Sculptor, 1834-1904,was a French sculptor. He is also known as Amilcar Hasenfratz, a pseudonym used for his paintings of Egyptian subjects, apparently because of concern that his work in another medium would distract from his sculpture. Born in Colmar, Alsace, Bartholdi went to Paris to further his studies in architecture as well as painting. Then he made a long trip to Egypt and Yemen, where he heard about the Suez project. He came back to his native city to become an architect. Bartholdi was a freemason, he was initiated on October 14, 1875 in the lodge LeAlsace-Lorraine, Grand Orient of France.
Emile Bernard
1868-1941 French Emile Bernard Galleries (b Lille, 28 April 1868; d Paris, 15 April 1941). French painter and writer. He was the son of a cloth merchant. Relations with his parents were never harmonious, and in 1884, against his fathers wishes, he enrolled as a student at the Atelier Cormon in Paris. There he became a close friend of Louis Anquetin and Toulouse-Lautrec. In suburban views of Asnires, where his parents lived, Bernard experimented with Impressionist and then Pointillist colour theory, in direct opposition to his masters academic teaching; an argument with Fernand Cormon led to his expulsion from the studio in 1886. He made a walking tour of Normandy and Brittany that year, drawn to Gothic architecture and the simplicity of the carved Breton calvaries. In Concarneau he struck up a friendship with Claude-Emile Schuffenecker and met Gauguin briefly in Pont-Aven. During the winter Bernard met van Gogh and frequented the shop of the colour merchant Julien-Franois Tanguy, where he gained access to the little-known work of Cezanne.