723. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882),

English, Beata Beatrix, c. 1864-1870.

Oil on canvas, 86.4 x 66 cm. Tate Britain,

London. Pre-Raphaelite.

 

 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

(1828 London – 1882 Birchington)

 

Rossetti’s father, an Italian patriot who had sought refuge in London where he became professor of Italian at King’s College, was a distinguished Dante scholar. Dante Gabriel was poet as well as painter.

Rossetti was extraordinarily precocious, and very early he became acquainted with Sir Walter Scott and Shakespeare, but the chief influence of his childhood was the worship of Dante; he knew the poems by heart. He could not find the help he wanted in the systematic methods of the Royal Academy, and he was impatient to paint the pictures that filled his brain. Consequently he never acquired a complete command of drawing. Perhaps he was not encouraged to try for such mastery, because of his fondness for subjects from Dante and his instinctive feeling that they must be represented with the almost childlike simplicity of feeling.

At the age of twenty-one Rossetti founded, together with Hunt, John Millais, three young sculptors, and Rossetti’s younger brother, a society with the title of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who were in the habit of affixing to their signatures the letters, P. R. B. The object of the Brotherhood was to revolt against existing views and conditions of art; in its original intention not unlike the revolt of Courbet; a plea for Realism. He was ridiculing the dry formalism of the Classicists.