Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) was born in London to the Italian émigré scholar Gabriele Rossetti; the poet Christina Rossetti was his sister. He studied at Henry Sass's drawing academy and the Antique School of the Royal Academy, then under Ford Madox Brown, and in 1848 founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. He was a poet and translator as well as a painter, and often wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures. His first major oils, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini, both show Mary as a teenage girl; stung by the criticism of the second, he turned to watercolour and rarely exhibited again. From about 1860 his style grew denser and richer, drawing on later Italian Renaissance painting, and usually centred on a single female figure against lush vegetation. His work inspired William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones and anticipated the Aesthetic movement. Two works here, one from each side of that change: The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Veronica Veronese, for which Alexa Wilding sat.