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 Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed.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 Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Paradise | Saint Catherine | Girlhood of Mary Virgin | cropped version of Veronica Veronese | proserpine |
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Auguste Leveque
(b. Nivelles, Walloon Brabant 1866 - d. Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, 1921) is a Belgian painter influenced both by realism and symbolism. Leveque was also a sculptor, poet and art theoretician. He studied under Jean-François Portaels at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and received the Prix Godecharle for his painting Job in 1890. Leveque was a member of the "Salon d'Art Idealiste", formed by Jean Delville in Brussels in 1896, which is considered the Belgian equivalent to the Parisian Rose & Cross Salon. Other members of the group were Leon Frederic, Albert Ciamberlani, Constant Montald, Emile Motte, Victor Rousseau, Armand Point and Alexandre Seon. The Salon was abandoned in 1898.
Erskine Nicol
British Genre Painter , (1825-1904) was an Irish/Scottish painter. A student of William Allan, Nicol taught in Dublin, Ireland, from 1845-50, at the height of the Irish famine, and considered himself as much Irish as he was Scottish. Much of his work portrays the injustices inflicted upon the Irish population during the 19th century. He was made an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1855 and an Academician in 1859. Nicol exhibited at the Royal Academy and was made an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1866
Miller, Richard Emil
American Impressionist Painter, 1875-1943