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 Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed.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 :. | Venus Verticordia | Arthur's Tomb: The Last Meeting of Launcelort and Guinevere (mk28) | Venus Vertisordia | The Loving Cup | Bocca Baciata (mk28) |
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Charles Green,RI
1840-1898
EYBL, Franz
1805, Vienna - 1880, Vienna,Austrian painter and lithographer. He entered the Vienna Akademie at the age of ten, studying sculpture under Josef Klieber and landscape painting (1817-20) with Joseph Messmer (1780-1845), from whom he also learnt the new technique of lithography. He then spent three years with Johann Baptist Lampi (i) and Franz Caucig (1762-1828), drawing after antique statues and casts. He studied history painting (1823-8), during which period he came under the influence of Johann Peter Krafft, who introduced him to the principles of realism, suggesting that he work directly from nature and reflect contemporary, everyday subject-matter in his painting. Together with Josef Danhauser and Matthias Ranftl (1805-54), Eybl was among the most significant followers of Krafft's ideas,
HONDECOETER, Melchior d
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1636-1695 Dutch animal painter. His grandfather, Gillis d'Hondecoeter (d. 1638) and his father, Gysbert d'Hondecoeter (1604?C1653), were landscape and animal painters. After four years at The Hague, where he painted The Menagerie of William III at Loo, Melchior settled in Amsterdam. He painted all forms of animal life, but is best known for his depiction of birds and fowl, in which he has few equals. Representative works, executed in a smooth, precise style, include the Dead Cock