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 Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed.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 :. | Beata Beatrix | La Ghirlandate (mk28) | Ecce Ancilla Domini | Portrait of Algernon Swinburne | Arthur's Tomb: The Last Meeting of Launcelort and Guinevere (mk28) |
Related Artists:
Luca Signorelli
Crtona 1441-1523 .Italian painter of the Umbrian school, who probably studied with Piero della Francesca. He worked in Cortona, where some of his paintings have remained. Subsequently he worked in the Cathedral of Perugia, in Volterra, and at Monte Oliveto before undertaking (1499) the decoration of the Cappella Nuova in the Orvieto Cathedral. There he represented the apocalyptic series of the Story of the Anti-Christ, the End of the World, the Resurrection of the Bodies, Paradise, and the Inferno, as well as figurations from antique poems and the Divine Comedy. The infernal scenes are remarkable for their imaginative evocation of fiends and tortures of Hell. Michelangelo was influenced by his powerful treatment of anatomy and the vivid realism he used for dramatic ends. Signorelli's paintings in the Vatican, where he went in 1508, were later sacrificed to make way for some of Raphael's work.
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
Anthonie Leemans
(1631, The Hague - 1673, Amsterdam), was a Dutch Golden Age painter. According to Houbraken, who did not specify which brother he meant, he made a profitable living making trompe l'oeil paintings of hunting paraphernalia, birdcages, and weaponry. According to the RKD he was the older brother of the painter Johannes Leemans, and both are known for still life paintings of hunting paraphernalia and vanitas pieces that became an influence on Christoffel Pierson for their popularity. Anthonie also painted a few Italianate landscapes with soldiers.