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 Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed.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 :. | King Rene's Honeymoon | The Tune of Seven Towers (mk28) | Regina Cordium | The Seed of David (mk28) | The Bride (mk28) |
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Jusepe Leonardo
Spanish Baroque Era Painter , 1601-c.1652
William Knight Keeling
(1807-1886) was a British (Victorian) artist, an illustrator of Walter Scott's novels and Shakespeare's plays, a founder and the third President of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts. William Knight Keeling. Love's Messenger. 1856William Knight Keeling was born in Manchester. He was apprenticed to a wood-engraver, and in the 1830s went to London and became an assistant of William Bradley (1801-1857), a Manchester-born portrait painter who moved to London in 1822 and established himself as a portrait painter. However, Keeling returned to Manchester in 1835 and firmly established himself as a popular and respected portrait and figurative painter in oils and watercolour, and a drawing-master. From 1830s, he actively exhibited in Manchester, Liverpool and elsewhere. In 1833, his painting 'The Bird's Nest' was awarded the silver medal from the Royal Manchester Institution. In 1841, he was elected a member of the New Society of Painters in Watercolours where he exhibited about 60 works. In 1859, Keeling became a founder of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts, and its third president from 1865 to 1877. He was a member of the Manchester Literary Club and the Brasenose Club. In the 1850s, following the notion of the day, he travelled to Spain. This journey gave him new ideas, subjects, and motifs. Delicate details and clear and bright palette inspired by hot colours of the South, are distinctive features of his paintings and watercolours. In 1873, a Manchester newspaper praised one of his watercolours as "an exquisite work, perfectly Spanish". He also was influenced by works by the great Spanish artist Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-1682). Murilloes street children can be easily recognised in Keelinges compassionate depictions of poor children, both British and Spanish. His eSpanish Boye exhibited in Manchester in 1876, was described as "a very good example of the careful and accurate method pursued by the artist. He is thoroughly conscientious in all his professional work." In 1851, in London, Keeling married Mary Ann Charker (b.1822). They had four children: Edith (b.1852), Dalton Harper (b.1853), Sidney Charles (b.1859), and Gertrude Ann (b.1862). Keeling died on 21.02.1886 in his house at Barton-upon-Irwell, Manchester. Keeling did not strive for fame and glory, and remained in the background of the artistic life of his time, although many connoisseurs appreciated his works. Several his works have been preserved at Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In the 1870s, Wolverhampton industrialist and collector Sidney Cartwright purchased from a Manchester exhibition a large number of Keelinges works. In 1887, they were given to Wolverhampton Art Gallery which possesses today possibly the largest collection of Keelinges paitings and watercolours in the United Kingdom.
Francesco del Cossa
Italian c1435-c1478 Francesco del Cossa Location Italian painter. He was a leading representative of the Ferrarese school and was regarded, with Ercole de Roberti, as the founder of the Bolognese school. His principal works include The Glorification of March, April, and May, frescoes in the Schifanoia Palace, Ferrara; some admirable portraits of the artist contemporaries; Madonna Enthroned (Bologna); Madonna and Child with Angels, St. Liberal, and St. Lucy (National Gall. of Art, Washington, D.C.); and an altarpiece representing scenes from the life of St. Vincent Ferrer (National Gall., London, and the Vatican).