DANTE GABRIEL (or properly GABRIEL CHARLES DANTE), an English painter and poet; born in London, May 12, 1828, eld est son of Gabriele. He was educated in King's College School, London; but, hav ing from his earliest years evinced a wish to become a painter, he was taken from school in 1843 and began the study of art, entering soon afterward the an tique school of the Royal Academy. Here he associated with the young painters John Everett Millais and William Hol man Hunt, and the sculptor Thomas Woolner; along with these three he founded the so-called Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which was completed by the addition of three other members. The chief incentive to the foundation of this society, and of the school of art which it initiated, was the distaste of the followers for the commonplace sub jects and slurred execution in current English art. They aimed to revive the lofty feeling, and patient handiwork, which had been developed by ,the Euro pean schools of art preceding the cul mination of Raphael and his followers.
The English Pre-Raphaelites wished to exhibit true and high ideas through the medium of true and rightly elaborated details. Rossetti's earliest oil picture, exhibited in 1849, was "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin"; his next (1850), now in the National Gallery, "The Annuncia tion." After this he withdrew from ex hibiting almost entirely, and his art developed through other phases, in which the sense of human beauty, intensity of abstract expression, and richness of color were leading elements. He produced nu merous water-colors of a legendary or romantic cast, several of them being from the poems of Dante, others from the Arthurian tradition.
Among his principal oil pictures are the Triptych for Llandaff Cathedral, of the "Infant Christ Adored by a Shep herd and a King," "The Beloved" (the Bride of the Canticles), "Dante's Dream" (now in the Walker Gallery, Liverpool), "Beata Beatrix" (National Gallery), "Pandora," "Proserpine," "The Blessed Damozel" (from one of his own poems), "The Roman Widow," "La Ghirlandata," "Venus Astarte," "The Day-dream." He designed several large compositions, such as the "Magdalene at the door of Simon the Pharisee," "Giotto Painting Dante's Portrait," "Cassandra," and the "Boat of Love" (from a sonnet by Dante). Notwithstanding his passionate impulse as an inventive artist, and his impress ive realization of beauty in countenance and color, some shortcomings in severe draughtsmanship and in technical meth od, and some degree of mannerism in form and treatment, have often, and not unjustly, been laid to his charge.
Rossetti began writing poetry about the same time that he took definitely to the study of painting. Besides some juvenile work, and some translations from the German (that of "Henry the Leper," by the mediaeval poet, Hartmann von der Aue, is preserved), he executed a number of translations from Dante and other Italians, published in 1861 as "The Early Italian Poets," and again in 1874 as "Dante and his Circle." Two of his best-known original poems, "The Portrait" and "The Blessed Damozel," were written in his 19th year, and many others followed. Rossetti had fallen in love toward 1851 with a very beautiful girl, a dressmaker's assistant, named Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal; he married her in 1860, but she died suddenly in February, 1862. In the first impulse of desperation he buried his MSS. in her coffin. In 1869 he thought fit to recover them, and in 1870 he issued his volume named "Poems." This volume was a suc cess with poetical readers, and was re viewed with great admiration and even enthusiasm by some leading critics. Late in 1871, however, Mr. Robert Buchanan, writing in the "Contemporary Review" under the pseudonym of "Thomas Mait land," attacked the book on literary, and more especially on moral grounds.
Rossetti was now in a depressed state of health, suffering much from insomnia, from an abuse of chloral as a palliative, and from weakened eyesight. About the middle of 1872 he became morbidly sen sitive and gloomy, and very recluse in his habits of life. In 1881 he published a second volume of poems named "Bal lads and Sonnets" (containing some of his finest work, "Rose Mary," "The White Ship," "The King's Tragedy," and the completed sonnet-sequence, "The House of Life"). A touch of paralysis affected him toward the end of 1881, and, retiring in the hope of some im provement to Birchington-on-Sea, near Margate, he died there April 9, 1882.
The poetry of Rossetti is intense in feeling, exalted in tone, highly individ ual in personal gift, picturesque and sometimes pictorial in treatment, and elaborately wrought in literary form. These characteristics are sometimes made consistent with simplicity, but more generally with subtlety, of emo tion or of thought. As in his paintings, there is a strong medimval tendency.