Who is Rossetti- the Artist and the Man

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 John Ruskin, criticism of his paintings caused him to withdraw from public exhibitions and turn to watercolours, 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 dead child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in her grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed.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.
[edit]Later life and death

During this time, Rossetti acquired an obsession for exotic animals, and in particular wombats. He would frequently ask friends to meet him at the "Wombat's Lair" at the London Zoo in Regent's Park, and would spend hours there himself. Finally, in September 1869, he was to acquire the first of two pet wombats. This shortlived wombat, named "Top", was often brought to the dinner table and allowed to sleep in the large centrepiece of the dinner table during meals.

A Vision of Fiammetta (1878), one of Rossetti's last paintings is now in the collection of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
During these years, Rossetti was prevailed upon by friends to exhume his poems from his wife's grave. This he did, collating and publishing them in 1870 in the volume Poems by D. G. Rossetti. They created a controversy when they were attacked as the epitome of the "fleshly school of poetry". The eroticism and sensuality of the poems caused offense. One poem, "Nuptial Sleep", described a couple falling asleep after sex. This was part of Rossetti's sonnet sequence The House of Life, a complex series of poems tracing the physical and spiritual development of an intimate relationship. Rossetti described the sonnet form as a "moment's monument", implying that it sought to contain the feelings of a fleeting moment, and to reflect upon their meaning. The House of Life was a series of interacting monuments to these moments-an elaborate whole made from a mosaic of intensely described fragments. This was Rossetti's most substantial literary achievement.
In 1881, Rossetti published a second volume of poems, Ballads and Sonnets, which included the remaining sonnets from the The House of Life sequence.
Toward the end of his life, Rossetti sank into a morbid state, darkened by his drug addiction to chloral and increasing mental instability, possibly worsened by his reaction to savage critical attacks on his disinterred (1869) poetry from the manuscript poems he had buried with his wife. He spent his last years as a withdrawn recluse.
On Easter Sunday, 1882, he died at the country house of a friend, where he had gone in yet another vain attempt to recover his health, which had been destroyed by chloral as his wife's had been destroyed by laudanum. He is buried at Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, England. His grave is visited regularly by admirers of his life's work and achievements and this can be seen by fresh flowers placed there regularly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti
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"Love is the last relay and ultimate outposts of eternity."

"A sonnet is a moment's monument, -/ Memorial from the Soul's eternity/ To one dead deathless hour."

"I have been here before./ But when or how I cannot tell:/ I know the grass beyond the door,/ The sweet keen smell,/ The sighing sound, the lights around the shore."

"The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank."

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

and something quite haunting to me taken from

http://www.neuroticpoets.com/rossetti/

below in my links you can find a live connection.. be sure and read more about him there.. so haunting!

After leaving Kelmscott because of a fight with some locals, Rossetti worked on his painting of The Blessed Damozel as a compliment to his poem of many years earlier. By 1877 he had finished his major work Venus Astarte (Astarte Syriaca) with Jane Morris as model. In a sonnet written to go with this painting, the erotic nature of the image is made clear:

Her twofold girdle clasps the infinite boon
Of bliss whereof the heaven and earth commune:
And from her neck's inclining flower-stem lean
Love-freighted lips and absolute eyes that wean
The pulse of hearts to the spheres' dominant tune.
Unfortunately, by 1879 Rossetti's chloral consumption was at an all-time high, and his depression was deepening. He became more of a recluse at Tudor House, and his friends rarely visited. After a slight recovery the following year, he produced what was to be his last major painting, The Day Dream, based upon an earlier sketch he'd made of Jane Morris sitting in a tree.

"... I shall not sink, I trust, so long as the poetic life wells up in me at intervals ... and so long as my painting still interests me...." ~ Rossetti in a letter, 1881 ~
By 1881 he was collecting old and new poems together for another publication. His volume Ballads and Sonnets appeared in the fall. It included the House of Life sequence, a collection of verses which were something of a reflection of Rossetti's life. Divided into two sections: Youth and Change and Change and Fate, the series included philosophical poems rich in imagery such as The Choice:

Eat thou and drink; to-morrow thou shalt die.
Surely the earth, that's wise being very old,
Needs not our help. Then loose me, love, and hold
Thy sultry hair up from my face; that I
May pour for thee this golden wine, brim-high,
Till round the glass thy fingers glow like gold,
We'll drown all hours: thy song, while hours are toll'd,
Shall leap, as fountains veil the changing sky.
In December of 1881 Rossetti had a mild stroke which left him largely paralyzed. He soon grew ill and, his physical decline caused his friends and family to fear that this was the end. Dante Gabriel Rossetti died on Easter Sunday (April 9) of 1882, and because he had firmly expressed that he did not want to be buried next to Lizzie in London, he was laid to rest in a churchyard near where he died in Birchington-On-Sea.