Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite BrotherhoodPRBDGR, Proserpine, 1874

Dante Gabriel Rossetti,The Beloved, 1865-6Pre-Raphaelite?Raphael: Italian Renaissance Painter (1483-1520)Royal Academy in England:S-shaped compositionPrincipal figure in most lightOne corner shadedEtc.

Art Rebels!Aggressive precisionEnglish (not European) themesMedievalismNatureUnconventional compositional structureNothing is more important about the Pre-Raphaelites than their ability to turn the group label, which had been an image in criticism of inferior art, into a self-conscious badge of rebellion (A. Elfenbein, Pre Raphaelites)

Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience(1853-4)

Holman Hunt, The Scapegoat, 1854

John Everett Millais, Ophelia (1851)

D.G. Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini!(The Annunciation) 1849-50

Dante Gabriel Rossetti,Venus Verticordia, 1864-8Robert Buchanan: The Fleshly School of Poetry (1871)In all Rossettis work, There is the same thinness and transparence of design, the same combination of the simple and the grotesque, the same morbid deviation from healthy forms of life, the same sense of weary, wasting, yet exquisite sensuality; nothing virile, nothing tender, nothing completely sane; a superfluity of extreme sensibility, of delight in beautiful forms, hues, and tints, and a deep-seated indifference to all agitating forces and agencies, all tumultuous griefs and sorrows, all the thunderous stress of life, and all the straining storm of speculation.

Elizabeth SiddallDGR Sketch,n.d.

Suicide: 1862Exhumed: 1869Poems pub. 1870

DGRBeata Beatrix, 1864

From drawingsof Elizabeth SiddallVision, Attachment, Desire, PowerRossettis oeuvre is perhaps the most sustained Victorian philosophical meditation on on the operations of masculine heterosexual desire. In his poetry and painting, he attempted to think through the operations of vision, representation, loss, connection, isolation, and erotic attachment. (K.A. Psomiades, D.G. Rossetti, n.p.)

DG Rossetti, Lady Lilith, 1866-8, Revised 1872-3 subtly of herself contemplative, Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave. This is her picture as she was: It seems a thing to wonder on,As though mine image in the glass Should tarry when myself am gone.I gave until she seems to stir, Until mine eyes almost aver That now, even now, the sweet lips partTo breathe the words of the sweet heart:And yet the earth is over her.

D.G. Rossetti, from The PortraitChristina Rossetti, In An Artists StudioOne face looks out from all his canvases,One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:We found her hidden just behind those screens,That mirror gave back all her loveliness.A queen in opal or in ruby dress,A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,A saint, an angel -- every canvas meansThe same one meaning, neither more nor less.He feeds upon her face by day and night,And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

D.G. Rossetti, The Blessed Damozel,1875-8(Painted after the poem)

DG Rossetti,Algernon Charles Swinburne(n.d.)