Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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 Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed.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 Seed of David | Beata Beatrix | The Day Dream | The Annunciation | Paolo and Francesca da Rimini | Related Artists: Marie Spartali StillmanEnglish Pre-Raphaelite Painter, 1844-1927
was a British Pre-Raphaelite painter of Greek descent, arguably the greatest female artist of that movement. During a sixty-year career she produced over one hundred works, contributing regularly to galleries in Great Britain and the United States. Maria Spartali was the youngest daughter of Michael Spartali, a wealthy merchant and Greek consul-general based in London, and his wife Euphrosyne. She and her cousins Maria Zambaco and Aglaia Coronio were known collectively among friends as "the Three Graces", after the Charites of Greek mythology (Aglaia, Euphrosyne and Thalia), as all three were noted beauties of Greek heritage. Swinburne said of Spartali: "She is so beautiful that I want to sit down and cry". Spartali studied under Ford Madox Brown for several years from 1864, with his children Lucy, Catherine and Oliver. She modelled for: Brown; Burne-Jones (The Mill); Julia Margaret Cameron; Rossetti (A Vision of Fiammetta, Dante's Dream, The Bower Meadow); Spencer Stanhope; and Whistler (La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine). In 1871, against her parents' wishes, she married American journalist and painter William J. Stillman. She was his second wife, his first having committed suicide two years before. His job as a foreign correspondent resulted in the couple dividing their time between London and Florence from 1878 to 1883, and then Rome from 1889 to 1896. Emmanuel de WitteDutch
1617-1692
Emmanuel de Witte Gallery
Dutch painter. He was one of the last and, with Pieter Saenredam, one of the most accomplished 17th-century artists who specialized in representing church interiors. He trained with Evert van Aelst (1602-57) in Delft and in 1636 joined the Guild of St Luke at Alkmaar, but he was recorded in Rotterdam in the summers of 1639 and 1640. In October 1641 his daughter was baptized in Delft, where he entered the Guild of St Luke in June 1642 and lived for a decade, moving to Amsterdam c. 1652. He began his long career as an unpromising figure painter, as can be seen in the Vertumnus and Pomona (1644) and two small pendant portraits (1648; all Rotterdam, Mus. Boymans-van Beuningen). Johann Christoph RincklakeJohann Christoph Rincklake (1764-1813).
Date of birth and death 19 October 1764(1764-10-19) and 19 June 1813(1813-06-19) .
Location of birth and death, Harsewinkel and Munster.
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