Dante+Gabriel+Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born in London on May 12, 1828, and was the second eldest of Gabriele and Frances Rossetti’s four children. Meeting in London, Rossetti’s parents both came from Italian exiled families; thus their children were raised to be fluent in both Italian and English (McGann 1). Gabriele taught Italian at King’s College until he was forced to retire due to deteriorating eyesight (Sharp 5).

After his Godfather, Charles Lyell, passed away, Dante changed his signature from his original birth name, Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, to Dante Rossetti as a sign of dedication to the famous Italian poet Dante Alighieri (Harris 1228). All four of the Rossetti children were poetically inclined. Both Dante and his younger sister Christina Rossetti's careers flourished in poetics, while his older sister, Maria Francesca, published “The Shadow of Dante,” which is a study of Dante and his life and pilgrimage. Dante’s younger brother William Michael Rossetti became a writer also, and worked closely with Dante when the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was created around 1848 or 1849 (Sharp 17).

Growing up, Dante attended drawing school before eventually attending King’s College from 1837-1842. Dante left King’s College to further his schooling at the Royal Academy in 1845, but dropped out shortly after to study under Ford Madox Brown, an English painter (Sharp 11). In 1848, Rossetti met with William Holman Hunt, a member of Royal Academy of Arts. The two men joined with fellow painter John Everett Millais, along with four other members, resulting in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which ended the year as a seven man united front which included Dante’s younger brother, William Michael.

In 1849, an art exhibit by the painters of the group was harshly attacked by a bounty of people including the president of the Royal Arts Academy (McGann 1). The group received a boost, however, when critic John Ruskin came to their defence, and whose authority established the movement’s “cultural position” (McGann 1).

Starting in the 1850’s, Rossetti’s art began to change and his focus largely turned towards his paintings. Rossetti, along with William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and A.C. Swinburne, were all hired in 1857 to paint the walls of the Debating Hall in Oxford for the “Jovial Campaign” (McGann 2). This began to move Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood away from their earlier negative publicity.

Sometime during 1850, Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal who became his model and his muse. The two were engaged a year later but did not marry for almost a decade perhaps due to class differences and a procrastination of introducing Siddal to his family. Throughout the years in between, Rossetti also encountered women like Fanny Cornforth and Jane Burden, who equally seemed to inspire Rossetti. After only two short years of marriage, Rossetti’s wife suffered an overdose of laudanum and died. While her death on February 11 1862 was considered highly suspicious, it was ruled as an accident. She was buried with a collection of Rossetti's unpublished poems.

During the early 1860’s, Rossetti’s reputation as a painter thrived, but after the loss of his wife depression slowly began to penetrate his life. Rossetti moved to 16 Cheyne Walk where he lived with Swinburne, and where Rossetti’s brother William visited often. It was around this time that one of his models, Fanny Cornforth, became his housekeeper and mistress. In the later part of the 1860’s, Rossetti’s mental health began to crumble further and he began to suffer from insomnia. As a prescription to cure his insomnia, Rossetti was prescribed chloral-a hypnotic sedative (Harris 1228). Around the same time, Rossetti began to fear he was following in his father’s footsteps and his eyesight was deteriorating. Since Rossetti did not have any duplicate copies of his works, in 1869 he decided to recover the ones he had buried with his late wife. After exhuming them from her grave, they were published with a few new poems in 1870 (Sharp 27).

Rossetti’s poems were well received by the majority of people, but also met with great criticism from authors such as Robert Buchanan, who wrote “The Fleshy School of Poetry- Mr. D.G. Rossetti.” He heavily criticized Rossetti by insulting his writing style, which caused a greater decline in Rossetti’s mental health.

In March 1870, Rossetti moved to Oxfordshire where he lived with Jane Morris, wife of William Morris, and her children. Rossetti and Jane formed an intimate relationship in the absence of her husband who had left to go to Iceland. Shortly after William returned and left with his wife and children, Rossetti suffered a complete mental breakdown. He was plagued by hallucinations. He persevered with his art and he continued to produce brilliant pieces but suffered much and at one point attempted suicide by laudanum. In his final years, Rossetti moved once more to the Lake District to reside with a friend, where he passed away on Easter day, April 9, 1882 of kidney failure. He was buried five days later in Birchington Parish Churchyard before his fifty-fifth birthday. ~UVic Engl 386/2016

Works Cited:

Boos, Florence S. "The Pre-Raphaelites. (Guide to the Year's Work)(William Morris, Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.)" Victorian Poetry. 49 (2011). Web.

Bragman, L.J. "The Case of Dante Gabriel Rossetti- a psychological study of a chloral addict." The American Journal of Psychiatry. 92 (1936). Web.

Bullen, J.B. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2015. Web.

Fedeman, William E. "A Shadow of Dante: Rossetti in the Final Years." West Virginia University Press (1982). 30 (2012): 217-245. Web.

Harris, James C. “Beata Beatrix.” Archives of General Psychiatry. 64 (2007): 1228. Web.

Harrison, Antony H. "The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, vols 1-2, The Formative Years, Charlotte Street to Cheyne Walk (1835-1862)." Victorian Poetry. 42 (2004): 201. Web.

McGann, Jerome J. "An Introduction to D.G. Rossetti." University of Virginia. Web.

Pieri, Guilana. "The Critical Reception of Pre-Raphaelitism in Italy, 1878-1910." The Modern Language Review. 99 (2004): 364-381. Web.

Sharp, William. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti; a record and a study.” Internet Archive. Part of the University of Toronto collection.London Macmillan, 1882. Web.

Stauffer, Andrew M. "Five Letters from D.G. Rossetti to John Payne." Huntington Library Quarterly. 66 (2003): 177-189. Web.