William Morris and Red House

A number of sources give good summaries of the life of Dante Gabriel Rosetti. See below for:

Victoria Web - Dante Gabriel Rosetti

Wikipedia - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The present extract is taken, with thanks, from Jan Marsh, The Pre-Raphaelites ( p15-17), 1998, NPG

'Rossetti had an abundance of ideas, pictorial and also literary, and was fuller of "notions" than the other two', wrote his brother William, who also remarked on 'the profusion of wild elf-locks' the young Dante Gabriel affected as a student. His early drawing of himself captures the young, enthusiastic Rossetti. It might well be entitled 'Portrait of the Artist as Romantic Poet' - an apt prophecy of his dual renown in art and literature.Born in London, son of an exiled Italian poet and patriot and his English-born, half Italian wife, Rossetti left school at 14 to study art. Founder member of the PRB, he was a key contributor to The Germ, with his tale of Chiaro dell'Erma, the real, if fictional, Pre-Raphaelite who paints a vision of his own soul. Possessing the 'temprament of a leader', he was, according to William Rossetti:

impetuous and vehement and necessarily therefore; easily angered, easily appeased....steeped in the sense of beauty and loving, if not always practising, the good; keenly alive also to the laughable as well as the grave or solemn side of things; superstitious in grain and anti-scientific to the marrow. (W.M.Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, 1895)

Choosing apainting over poetry, his first works attracted attention, but thenceforth he preferred to sell pictures privately rather than exhibit. Close to Ruskin in the mid-1850's, with a shared passion for medievalism, he encouraged Burne-Jones and William Morris, and was their partner in the Firm until 1864. 'He taught me to have no fear or shame of my own ideas, to design perpetually, to seek no popularity, to be altogether myself,' recalled Burne-Jones.

'With his spirit alike subtle and firey [he] was essentially a proselytiser, sometimes to an almost absurd degree, but possessed, alike in poetry or painting, with an appreciation of beauty of the most intense quality,' wrote William Holman Hunt. A fervent admirer of his namesake Dante as well as of Keats and of the Brownings, Rossetti also helped edit the first serious book on Blake. In 1861 he published Early Italian Poets, translations of works that were the literary equivalent of paintings before Raphael. Married in 1860 to Elizabeth Siddal, on her death in 1862 he consigned his original manuscript poems to her coffin. From the late1860s he was personally and pictorially devoted to Jane Morris, making her features those of the soulful 'Pre-Raphaelite woman' in its embodiment as femme fatale. 'The early watercolours are the best,' said Burne-Jones, adding that later Rossetti 'got to love nothing else in the world but a woman's face.'

His Poems of 1870 notoriously included those exhumed from his wife's grave. From 1871 he shared the lease of Kelmscott Manor with Morris, and the house with Jane. But then he suffered a breakdown with delusions of persecution. A warm friend, he was an implacable, unreasonable enemy. Dynamism and humour were replaced by paranoia and depression, which lent a melancholy cast to his work. This transition is clearly marked in his self-portrait of 1870. An older, troubled Rossetti fixes the onlooker with an obsessional gaze. Sadly, Holman Hunt observed, 'it was in the early days only that the soul within had been truly seen in his face'.

During an increasingly reclusive final decade, he continued painting and writing, dependent on the drug chloral and on the support of a few friends such as Theodore Watts-Dunton. Poems and Ballads appeared some few months after his death. Though as a poet he was already famed, the majority of his pictures were first seen by the public in a posthumous exhibition.