EN5838 The Pre-Raphaelite Revolution Gallery

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive at this location. 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (oil on canvas), was begun in August 1848 and completed for exhibition in March 1849. Christina Rossetti was the model for the Virgin; Gabriele…

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive at this location. 

Ecce Ancilla Domini! (oil on canvas) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a companion piece to The Girlhood of Mary Virgin…

John Everett Millais's painting depicts a scene from Boccaccio's Decameron. See the Walker Gallery Isabella webpages for full visual description and background to the painting. 

Notice the ways in which the composition imitates the flat perspective of Early Italian art: the figures at the dinner seem to be piled upon one another, and the landscape viewed through the window does not recede into the background towards a vanishing point (which establishes three-point perspective in Later Italian…

British Library Moxon Edition of Poems

Morris’s first volume faced mixed, even discouraging, reviews. It didn’t help that he had dedicated his volume to his mentor Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was disliked by certain reviewers. These retaliated by condemning the Defence as showing Pre-Raphaelite influence--notably in arcane subject matter and a concentration on detail.

More important was the reviewers’ reaction to the medievalism of the Defence poems. Whether they liked or disliked them, most agreed that Morris’s poems were original and even powerful, but they could not fully understand them (often they hadn’t read the…

Morris’s departure for Oxford was a great event in his life. He made close friends who shared his interest in historical and contemporary art, poetry, and contemporary affairs--Edward Burne-Jones, a future painter, Cromwell Price, a future headmaster, Vernon Lushington, a future judge, and Richard Watson Dixon, a future poet and clergyman. This “Oxford Brotherhood” admired the poems Morris had begun to write, and when they decided as a group on the ambitious venture of founding a magazine, The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, Morris became its first editor and chief contributor, writing…

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive at this location. 

The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice is a watercolour by Dante Gabriel Rossetti from 1853. The model for the head of the young woman was Elizabeth Siddal. Eriko Yamaguchi has identified a pictorial source…