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Born 192 years ago today, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet, illustrator, and painter .....

"I HAVE been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet, keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore." Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator, and a member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Rossetti was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. His work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement.

Rossetti's art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterised by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence, The House of Life. Poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossetti's work. He frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, spanning from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Astarte Syriaca (1877), while also creating art to illustrate poems such as Goblin Market by the celebrated poet Christina Rossetti, his sister.

Rossetti's personal life was closely linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and muses Elizabeth Siddal (whom he married), Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris.

The painter,and art critic, Roger Fry wrote in 1916, "Rossetti more than any other artist since Blake may be hailed as a forerunner of the new ideas" in English Art.

The son of émigré Italian scholar Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti and his wife Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti was born in London, on 12 May 1828. During his childhood, Rossetti was home educated and later attended King's College School, and often read the Bible, along with the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and Lord Byron.

Rossetti's first major paintings in oil display the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. His Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850) portray Mary as a teenage girl.

In 1850, Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal, an important model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Over the next decade, she became his muse, his pupil, and his passion. They were married in 1860.

For many years, Rossetti worked on English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova (published as The Early Italian Poets in 1861). These and Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur inspired his art of the 1850s. His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.

Around 1860, Rossetti returned to oil painting, abandoning the dense medieval compositions of the 1850s in favour of powerful close-up images of women in flat pictorial spaces characterised by dense colour. These paintings became a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement. In them, Rossetti's depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He portrayed his new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism

Rossetti's wife, Elizabeth, died of an overdose of laudanum in 1862, possibly a suicide, shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and on the death of his beloved Lizzie, buried the bulk of his unpublished poems with her at Highgate Cemetery, though he later had them dug up.

After the death of his wife, Rossetti leased a Tudor House at 16, Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea, where he lived for 20 years surrounded by extravagant furnishings and a parade of exotic birds and animals. Rossetti was fascinated with wombats, asking friends to meet him at the "Wombat's Lair" at the London Zoo in Regent's Park, and spending hours there. In September 1869, he acquired the first of two pet wombats, which he named "Top". It was brought to the dinner table and allowed to sleep in the large centrepiece during meals. Rossetti's fascination with exotic animals continued throughout his life, culminating in the purchase of a llama and a toucan, which he dressed in a cowboy hat and was trained to ride the llama round the dining-table for his amusement.

The savage reaction of critics to Rossetti's first collection of poetry contributed to a mental breakdown in June 1872. Toward the end of his life, he sank into a morbid state, darkened by his drug addiction to chloral hydrate and increasing mental instability. He spent his last years as a recluse. On Easter Sunday, 1882, he died at the country house of a friend, where he had gone in a vain attempt to recover his health, which had been destroyed by chloral as his wife's had been destroyed by laudanum.

Rossetti was played by Oliver Reed in Ken Russell's television film Dante's Inferno (1967).

This is my restored, and colourised version of a sepia toned photograph of "The Rossetti Family", taken on the 7th October 1863 by Lewis Carroll (writer of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) Picture Key: Left to right 1. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), Painter and poet. 2. Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894), Poet. 3. Frances Mary Lavinia Rossetti (née Polidori) (1800-1886), Mother of Dante Gabriel, William Michael and Christina Rossetti. 4. William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919), Critic and writer.

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