Notes on DGR & works, part 1

D.G. Rossetti and his works, part 1 of 3.

Rossetti, William M. "Notes on Rossetti and His Works." Art Journal (May 1884): 148. Web. 21 Sept. 2011.

Rossetti says the task of explaining the artist falls to him, Dante Rossetti's brother, which he plans to do work-by-work "in these present articles." The three-part series narrates Dante Rossetti's significant art works year by year, adding the historical and often personal context of each. This first article begins with Dante Rossetti's birth in 1828, although the first section is titled "1846-47."

After a brief biographical sketch of Dante Rossetti's childhood, the pattern of discourse includes chronologically arranged narrative regarding milestone event and art work as they occurred and in the context Rossetti feels the reader needs in order to understand and appreciate the artist. Details include pictorial subjects, locations, events and even the amount Dante Rossetti received for certain paintings. In the section labeled "April of 1855," Rossetti covers Dante Rossetti's introduction to members of the group that would eventually become the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (originally to be called "The Cytographic Society"), and describes their undertaking of the paintings in the Oxford Union.

Rossetti quotes Sir John Everett Millais and Holman Hunt on one of Dante Rossetti's early works, circulated among the PRB in the 1850s. In 1853, Rossetti notes, that both Ruskin and Dante Rossetti mentored Elizabeth Siddall, although William Rossetti states that Dante Rossetti did not meet Ruskin until much later.

See also parts two and three.

historian, critic

Dante Rossetti's work, dates, locations, events

historical fact, first-person accounts

Dante Rossetti, Sir John Everett Millais, Keats, Holman Hunt, Hancock, James Collinson, J.A.R. Munro, Thomas Woolner, John Ruskin, Michael Scott, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Morris, Miss Siddal, Algernon Swinburne

definitive

direct, deductive, authoritative

"Some of these are water colours; most of them are pen and ink or in pencil, executed with great simplicity and often with much naivete of though and method, but also with exceptional refinement and frequently with poetical and genuinely intuitive feel."