English Pre-Raphaelite Painter, 1828-1882 Rossetti's first major paintings display some of the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. His Girlhood of Mary, Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini both portray Mary as an emaciated and repressed teenage girl. His incomplete picture Found was his only major modern-life subject. It depicted a prostitute, lifted up from the street by a country-drover who recognises his old sweetheart. However, Rossetti increasingly preferred symbolic and mythological images to realistic ones. This was also true of his later poetry. Many of the ladies he portrayed have the image of idealized Botticelli's Venus, who was supposed to portray Simonetta Vespucci. Although he won support from the John Ruskin, criticism of his clubs caused him to withdraw from public exhibitions and turn to waterhum, which could be sold privately. In 1861, Rossetti published The Early Italian Poets, a set of English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova. These, and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, inspired his art in the 1850s. His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired his new friends of this time, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Rossetti also typically wrote sonnets for his pictures, such as "Astarte Syraica". As a designer, he worked with William Morris to produce images for stained glass and other decorative devices. Both these developments were precipitated by events in his private life, in particular by the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal. She had taken an overdose of laudanum shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed. He idealised her image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as Beata Beatrix. These paintings were to be a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement. In these works, Rossetti's depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He tended to portray his new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism, whilst another of his mistresses Jane Burden, the wife of his business partner William Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess.  Related Paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti :. | The Salutation of Beatrice | The Blue Closet (mk28) | How Sir Galahad,Sir Bors and Sir Percival were Fed with the Sanc Grael But Sir Percival's Sister Died by the Way (mk28) | The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (mk28) | Found |
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BLANCHARD, Jacques
French Baroque Era Painter, 1600-1638 He trained with his maternal uncle Nicolas Bollery (c. 1550/60-1630) from 1613 to 1618. He then set off for Italy but stopped at Lyon to work in the studio of Horace Le Blanc. Le Blanc left for Paris in 1623, and Blanchard is known to have finished a number of his works left in Lyon, including perhaps the Virgin and Child with a Bishop and a Woman Holding a Baby (Lyon, St Denis). At the end of October 1624 he reached Rome in the company of his brother Jean Blanchard, remaining there until April or May 1626. He was then in Venice until 1628, when he returned to Lyon via Turin.