Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Rossetti is the senior Pre-Raphaelite on this site for two reasons. He was not an Oxford undergraduate — he was educated in London and at the Royal Academy — but his short residence in Oxford during the summer of 1857 turned out to be the most consequential thing he did in the city's history of art. He brought the Brotherhood here. He also took home a face.

Founder of the Brotherhood

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti was born in London on 12 May 1828, the son of the émigré Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti and Frances Polidori; his sister was the poet Christina Rossetti. Trained at the Royal Academy and then under Ford Madox Brown, he co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. The Brotherhood set itself against the slick, Reynolds-trained academicism of the contemporary Royal Academy and in favour of the dense detail, intense colour and medieval seriousness of pre-Renaissance Italian and Flemish painting.

By the mid-1850s the original Brotherhood had effectively dissolved. Rossetti was, however, beginning to attract a younger circle of admirers — including two Exeter College undergraduates, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, who recruited him as a contributor to their Oxford and Cambridge Magazine in 1856. Neither man had then met him. By February 1857, Rossetti was writing to William Bell Scott about "two young men, projectors of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine... and both are men of real genius."

The Oxford Union, 1857

In the summer of 1857 Rossetti and Morris came to Oxford, found the new Union debating-hall under construction, and persuaded its committee to let them decorate the upper walls with scenes from Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. Seven artists were eventually recruited; Rossetti was their effective leader. His own panel was Sir Lancelot's Vision of the Holy Grail.

The story of the murals — the technical disaster (no plaster, no fresco training, paint peeling within months), Ruskin's complaint that the painters were "all the least bit crazy", and the slow restorations since — belongs to the Oxford Union Murals page. What belongs to Rossetti's biography is what came out of that summer for him personally. While in Oxford, he and Burne-Jones noticed two sisters at a local theatre: Bessie and Jane Burden, the daughters of an Oxford stableman. Rossetti recruited them as models. Jane sat for some of the murals; she married Morris at St Michael at the North Gate in April 1859.

The triangular relationship between Rossetti, Morris and Jane Morris — never quite an affair, never quite not — runs through the next two decades of Pre-Raphaelite painting. By the 1860s Rossetti was glamorising Jane as an ethereal goddess in canvas after canvas.

After Oxford

In 1860 Rossetti married his long-time model and pupil Elizabeth Siddal; she died two years later of a laudanum overdose, possibly suicide, after a stillborn child. In April 1861 he became one of the founding partners of Morris's new decorative arts firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., contributing stained-glass designs alongside his painting practice.

From 1869 Rossetti and Morris jointly rented Kelmscott Manor on the upper Thames in west Oxfordshire as a summer home — though in practice the lease became cover for Rossetti's relationship with Jane Morris, William Morris being conveniently absent in Iceland through much of 1871 and 1873. Morris reorganised the Firm in 1874, cutting Rossetti out, and Rossetti left Kelmscott abruptly in July 1874 and never returned.

His later years were dominated by chronic ill health, an addiction to chloral, and a steady output of close-up portraits of his successive muses — Fanny Cornforth, Jane Morris, Alexa Wilding. He died at Birchington-on-Sea in Kent on 9 April 1882, aged 53.

Sources: Wikipedia: Dante Gabriel Rossetti · Wikipedia: Oxford Union murals

Last verified: Fri May 15 2026 01:00:00 GMT+0100 (British Summer Time)