Each Dante Gabriel Rossetti oil painting is hand-painted with oil on linen canvas, created by one of HandmadePiece's professional painters. Museum quality with preview before shipment. Global free shipping.
1828 - 1882 • English • Painter • Pre-Raphaelite
"Lo! It is done. Above the long, lithe throat / The mouth's mould testifies of voice and kiss, / The shadowed eyes remember and foresee. / Her face is made her shrine. Let all men note / That in all years (o Love! Thy gift is this) / They that would look on her must come to me.' - Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Rossetti's father (Gabriel Pasquale Rossetti) was a Neapolitan poet and Dante scholar who had fought patriotically for a constitution against the Austrian king Ferdinand. He was forced to flee Italy and settled in London, where he taught at King's College. At the age of 13 young Rossetti-whose adopted name testifies to his and his father's literary interests-spent his time reading and illustrating Shakespeare, GOETHE, Byron, and Scott. For him, art and literature were inseparable, and although undecided whether painting or poetry should be his profession, it was understood that the former could be more lucrative. At 20 he was the instigator when he, with friends and fellow Royal Academy of Arts students William Holman HUNT and MILLAIS, launched the PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD. The three began to forge the first true Pre-Raphaelite manner in which outlines were hard, poses stiff and awkward, and shadows were not cast. In time Rossetti's subjects changed from legends and NARRATIVE topics to a series of bust-length pictures of beautiful, sensuous, extravagantly costumed, languorous, melancholy women. Fanny Cornforth, his mistress for 10 years, was the model for the first in the series that began, in 1859, with Bacca Baciata. The title is inspired by a poem of BOCCACCIO that says, "The mouth that has been kissed loses not its freshness; still it renews itself even as does the moon." The obsessive series continued during the 1860s. Another model was Elizabeth Siddall, a frail, consumptive, tragic "shop girl" whom he fell in love with and married in 1860. She died of an overdose of laudanum in 1862. He painted a memorial to her as his "Beatrice" (Beata Beatrix, c. 1864-70), an allusion to the Beatrice who was Dante's muse. Still another model was Jane Burden Morris, the wife of his friend William MORRIS. In 1868 she became his mistress. Rossetti's paintings inspired passion in their beholders: A contemporary wrote about Bacca Baciata's owner, "Boyce has bought it and will I expect kiss the dear thing's lips away before you come to see it." (BURNEJONES 's pictures also attracted kisses.) The women in Rossetti's series appear tightly confined, pushed to the front of the PICTURE PLANE, often with flowery wallpaper behind them that seems to cramp their freedom even more. These women are "being seen, while unseeing," the historian Griselda POLLOCK writes. They serve, fetishlike, to identify and enable male sexual self-definition in a circle of bourgeois intellectuals and artists. "This is therefore a question of sexuality and the mode of representation. . . . Rossetti's works predate Freud and the Hollywood cinema. But out of the same formations and its ordeals came both the analytic theories of Freud and the representational project of classic Hollywood cinema," Pollock concludes.