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Dante Gabriel Rossetti Fair Rosamund 1861
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti The Tune of Seven Towers 1857
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti Paolo and Francesca da Rimini 1855
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti Portrait of Elizabeth Siddal 1854
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Paradise 1853-54
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti Regina Cordium 1866
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti Astarte Syriaca 1877
Oil on canvas
72 x 42 in
Manchester City Art Gallery
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti The Salutation of Beatrice 1859
Oil on two panels
Each 29 1/2 x 31 1/2 in (74.9 x 80 cm)
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti Aurea Catena
c. 1868
Graphite and colored chalks on blue wove paper
30 3/8 x 24 5/8 in
Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti The Beloved 1865-66
32 1/2 x 30 in
Tate Gallery, London
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti Portrait of Algernon Swinburne 1861
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti The Seed of David 1858-64
Llandaff Cathedral, Wales
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti The Wedding of Saint George and Princess Sabra 1857
Watercolor on paper
14 3/8 x 14 3/8 in
Tate Gallery, London
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti Found 1854
36 x 31 1/2 in
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice 1853-54
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti Ecce Ancilla Domini 1849-50
28 1/8 x 16 1/2 in
Tate Gallery, London
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti The Girlhood of Mary Virgin 1848-49
Tate Gallery, London
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti Il Ramoscello 1865
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti Venus Verticordia 1864-68
38 5/8 x 27 1/2 in
Russell Cotes Art Gallery, Bournemouth
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti Mariana 1868-70
Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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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.
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