The Tate Britain exhibition dedicated to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his circle is rich in details about his life and works. The son of an Italian Dante scholar (hence his adopted first name homaging a poet who greatly influenced him) and of a mother whose surname, Polidori, reminds one that her brother, together with the Shelleys and Byron, each wrote a ghost story on the banks of lake Geneva during that fateful summer of 1815, Rossetti was undecided whether to become a poet or an artist.
He chose to be both and, particularly in his ‘House of Art’, combines both strains.

At first adhering to the manifesto of the Pre-Raphaelite painters who avoided both the academic strain of the Royal academicians and mannerist painters in favour of the purer forms and colours of early renaissance artists, Rossetti developed under the influence of Pater an ‘art for art’s sake’ philosophy and became an early prophet of aestheticism. He also hearkened back to mediaeval themes and in particular Arthurian legend, courtly love and chivalry.

Because the artist’s style went so much against high Victorian taste his paintings tended to be bought by a small group of connoisseurs and he never publicly exhibited.

Women, his muses, greatly influenced Rossetti’s art as inspiration and as models. Four of them were particularly important for his artistic development and they can easily be distinguished in his portraits.
‘Lizzie’ Siddal was an artist in her own right but sadly died just two years after they married of a laudanum overdose. Rossetti buried the manuscript of his poems in her tomb but re-exhumed her body when he decided he wanted to publish them Elizabeth Siddal haunted Rossetti for the remainder of his life as this portrait of her as Dante’s Beatrice shows.

Jane Burden was friend William Morris’s wife but a ex-marital relationship started between her and Rossetti. Her severe sculptural features were captured in photographs as well as in emotive paintings.

Another Rossetti muse, Fanny Cornforth, was perhaps the most beautiful of all but shocked his colleagues by her cockney accent and working class background.

All these women had sexual relationships with Dante Gabriel but a fourth muse, of whom very little is known, was just a model. She was Alexa Wilding and Rossetti painted more portraits of her than any of the others.

It’s ironic that Rossetti finished his life with an overdose like his wife. This time however it was chloral.

I enjoyed the exhibition very much and my appreciation of the painter/poet was considerably heightened. I cannot leave out another woman who perhaps more than any other inspired not so much his art but his poetry: his sister Cristina Rossetti. I am now quite ready to immerse myself into her ‘Goblin Market’ and discover yet more facets of a truly remarkable and formerly underestimated artistic movement.