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 Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed.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 :. | The Day Dream (mk28) | Dante's Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice (mk28) | Portrait of Maria Leathart (mk28) | The Salutation of Beatrice | The Bride |
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James Jacques Joseph Tissot
(15 October 1836 -- 8 August 1902) was a French painter. Tissot was born at Nantes. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Ingres, Flandrin and Lamothe, and exhibited in the Paris Salon for the first time at the age of twenty-three. In 1861 he showed The Meeting of Faust and Marguerite, which was purchased by the state for the Luxembourg Gallery. His first characteristic period made him a painter of the charms of women. Demi-mondaine would be more accurate as a description of the series of studies which he called La Femme a Paris.
Gustave Brion
1824-1877 French French painter and illustrator. His family settled in Strasbourg in 1831 and placed him in the studio of the portrait and history painter Gabriel-Christophe Gurin (1790-1846) in 1840. He then earned his living mainly by teaching drawing and copying paintings. In 1847 he successfully submitted his first work to the Salon: Farmhouse Interior at Dambach (untraced). In the summer of 1850 he moved to Paris, where he took a studio in a house shared by Realist artists. Brion exhibited regularly at the Salon: in 1852 The Towpath (untraced) was bought by the de Goncourt brothers; and in 1853 he showed the Potato Harvest during the Flooding of the Rhine in 1852 (Nantes, Mus. B.-A.), in which the influence of Gustave Courbet and Jean-Francois Millet (ii) can be seen in the Alsatian peasant figures.
Jan Stobbaerts
1539 - 1584