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 Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed.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 :. | Study for Venus Verticordia (mk28) | A Christmas Carol (mk28) | Bocca Baciata | The Blessed Damozel | Sir Galahad at the Ruined Chapel (mk28) |
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James Walker
American, 1819-1889
Giovanni dal ponte
Italian Painter, 1385-1437 He was reputed to have been a student of Spinello Aretino. He acquired the name dal Ponte due to the location of his studio at Santo Stefano a Ponte, Florence. He joined the Arte dei Medici e degli Speziali in 1410 and the Compagnia di S Luca in 1413. Outstanding debts brought him a prison sentence in 1424, but he still owed money to a carpenter three years later. By the late 1420s he had opened his own studio and formed a partnership with the painter Smeraldo di Giovanni (c. 1365-after 1442). Giovanni dal Ponte's varied and prolific production, which continued until his death, included fresco cycles, panels and the decoration of small objects. A number of allegorical panel paintings and cassoni are attributed to him. The animated, stylized figures in the Seven Liberal Arts (1435; Madrid, Prado) are shown in a garden dotted with naturalistic flowers and plants. His early work shows the impact of the Late Gothic style.
George Adolphus Storey
(1834-1919), Painter was an English portrait painter, genre painter and illustrator. Storey was born in London, but educated in Paris. When he returned to London, he worked briefly for an architect before studying under J. M. Leigh and J.L. Dulong. Though not a pupil he was also encouraged by William Behnes the sculptor, whose studio he visited. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1852 and studied at the Royal Academy schools from 1854. He was strongly incluenced by the Pre-Raphaelites but gave them up under influence of Charles Robert Leslie. Storey worked in North London, establishing a reputation as a genre and portrait painter, and also as an illustrator. He drew elegant pictures of middle class people for love stories and the like. Storey became ARA in 1875 and was a member of the Arts Club from 1874-95. He exhibited at the British Institution, the Royal Society of British Artists in Suffolk Street and the New Watercolour Society. He also published his autobiography in 1899, containing valuable information about the St John's Wood Clique, of which he was a member until he moved to Hampstead. From 1900, he was also the Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy, and became RA in 1914.