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 Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed.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 :. | Portrait of Elizabeth Siddal (mk28) | John Parsons Jane Morris (mk28) | King Rene's Honeymoon | Girlhood of Mary Virgin | Ecce Ancilla Domini |
Related Artists:
master of St-Germain-des-Pres
originally from cologne active in Paris about 1500
Elizabeth Shippen Green
American Golden Age Illustrator, 1871-1954 was an American illustrator. She illustrated children's books and worked for many years for Harper's Magazine. Green studied with the painters Thomas Anshutz and Robert Vonnoh at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1889-1893). She then began study with Howard Pyle at Drexel Institute where she met Violet Oakley and Jessie Willcox Smith. Life was made for love and cheer; Watercolor and charcoal on board, Harper's Magazine, September 1904She had already begun publishing when she was eighteen and began making pen and ink drawings and illustrations for St. Nicholas Magazine, Woman's Home Companion, and the Saturday Evening Post. In 1911, she signed an exclusive contract with Harper's Monthly. Green was also a prolific book illustrator. Green became close and lifelong friends with Oakley and Smith. They lived together first at the Red Rose Inn (they were called the Red Rose girls by Pyle) and later at Cogslea, their home in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. In 1911, Green married Huger Elliott, an architecture professor.
Emile Van Marcke de Lummen
1827-1890 Emile van Marcke was born in S??vres - into a family of artists. His father was Jean-Baptiste (1797-1848), the eldest son of Charles van Marcke and a painter who specialized not only in landscape and animal paintings, but also works on porcelain.