Early Career | Elizabeth Siddal | Fanny & Jane | Late Career

Early Career

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti was born in London on May 12, 1828 to Gabriele and Frances (Polidori) Rossetti. He later changed his name to emphasize his self-imposed association with the Italian poet Dante Aligheri, whose life he emulated and tried in his own way to recreate. His father, a Dante scholar, was exiled from Naples for his political activity.  He became a professor of Italian at King’s College London. 

Rossetti's mother was also half-Italian, so the children (including sisters Maria and Christina and brother William Michael) grew up fluent in both languages.  Both parents encouraged creativity and literacy in their children. Throughout his life, Rossetti alternated between identifying with his Italian ancestry and his contemporary Britishness.  In the end, he relied less and less on each and created instead his own dream world that was an amalgamation of the two. His personal life always influenced his art, his paintings influencing his relationships and vice versa.

Rossetti attended King’s College and then was schooled at F.S. Cary’s Academy of Art in preparation for entering the Royal Academy.  He was a member for a year, but became dissatisfied with the Academy's ideas about art and left to study under Ford Madox Brown. In 1846 he formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt.

In 1849 and 1850, Rossetti exhibited his first important paintings, Ecce Ancila Domini and The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, in the first Pre-Raphaelite exhibitions. Both of these paintings made use of his sister Christina, a poet, as a model. Christina's thinness, red hair, delicate feature and air of melancholy detachment were Rossetti's first ideals of feminine beauty, which in his early career mixed both earthly beauty and spirituality. For him, feminine beauty was equated to salvation. He concentrated on the spiritual, conceptual, and romantic in his early work, looking to recreate the poet Dante's representation of ideal love.

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Elizabeth Siddal

Rossetti soon found the Beatrice to his Dante in the form of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, a miliner's assistant he met around 1850. He painted her obsessively and she became the first archetype of the Pre-Raphaelite woman, with her flaming red hair, full lips and elogated neck. She modeled for other Pre-Raphaelite artists as well, most famously as Millais’ Ophelia (left, also see the Millais Gallery), for which she spent many hours posing for him wearing a beautifully brocaded dress and lying in a tub of water heated by oil lamps. One day during work on Ophelia, the lamps heating the water went out and the water grew increasingly cold, but Lizzie never said a word, which is a testament to her strong work ethic. She fell ill from this experience and may never have fully recovered.

For Rossetti, Lizzie Siddal was the epitome of idealized, spiritual love. However, the reality of her got in the way of his romantic vision. Although they had quickly became engaged, they did not marry until 1860. The reasons for this are uncertain, but may have included Siddal's poor health (she may have suffered from neuralgia), and Rossetti's womanizing, which must have been upsetting for her. During the time of their engagement, he was involved with his housekeeper, a former prostitute named Fanny Cornforth, and Annie Miller, another Pre-Raphaelite model. They also may have prolonged their engagement so that she could concentrate on her own poetry and painting. She even found a sponsor in the critic John Ruskin, who bought all of her works.

Siddal and Rossetti broke off their engagement for a time in 1858. It was probably around then that she began to use laudanum, an opiate which was commonly prescribed at the time, and she began ailing. Rossetti was notified and quickly married her in 1860, possibly because he was afraid she would die. After only two years of marriage, Siddal gave birth to a still-born baby girl. The shock of this event severely affected her. Georgiana Burne-Jones, the wife of Edward Burne-Jones, wrote of visiting her soon afterwards and of Lizzie crying out to them to be quiet, as they might wake the baby. One night, Rossetti came home to find her dead from an overdose of laudanum. It was believed to be a suicide, although the coroner ruled her death accidental.

Grief-stricken, Rossetti buried most of his poems with his wife. In 1868, he had her tomb exhumed to retrieve them, and stories began to circulate that Lizzie's lovely red hair had continued to grow after her death and that she still looked exactly as she had in life. While probably untrue, these stories are testament to the romance and tragedy that surrounded Siddal even then. Around he same time, Rossetti began work on Beata Beatrix, a painting inspired by Dante's Vita Nuova. It depicts the premature death of Beatrice as a spiritual transformation, filled with symbols of her death and Dante's love for her. It is now interpreted as Rossetti's memorial to Elizabeth Siddal.

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Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris

After Siddal's death, Rossetti lived in a house at 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, with his brother William, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, and the painter George Meridith. He became more involved with Fanny Cornforth, who had become his mistress because Lizzie Siddal refused to consummate their relationship. While at first he had painted the more plump and voluptuous Fanny as representative of earthly beauty in contrast to Lizzie's spiritual beauty, he started to see her as sinister after his wife's death. She became the seductive femme fatale in such paintings as Lady Lilith and Monna Vanna.

Rossetti continued to paint and became relatively prosperous. In the early 1860s, he and his friends met Jane Burden, the daughter of a stable hand from Oxford. She had an unusual and exotic appearance, tall, dark-haired and somber, which was opposite to the contemporary conventions of beauty. This made her very striking.

Rossetti made several drawings of her before her marriage to William Morris, but continued to be obsessed with her. She became his regular model and mistress after 1865. She represented something between the earthly beauty of Fanny and the spiritual beauty of Lizzie. Because she was somber and quiet, she was a blank tablet he could project all kinds of personas on. She is the model for such striking paintings as Daydream and Proserpine.

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Late Career

In the late 1860s, Rossetti began to suffer from headaches and began to take choral mixed with whiskey to cure the pain, becoming addicted to this and other drugs. This aggravated the paranoia and depression he was already prone to, which worsened after his paintings and drawings were visciously criticized as being the epitome of the "fleshly school of poetry."

In 1872, he suffered a complete mental breakdown, was taken to Scotland and attempted to kill himself.  He was able to make a significant recovery, however, and continued to paint until his death from kidney failure in 1882.

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(Information compiled from Wikipedia, Lizzie Siddal.com, and the VictorianWeb)