Dante Gabriel Rossetti Heaven. Around 1860, Rossetti returned to oil painting, abandoning the dense medieval compositions of the 1850s in favour of powerful close-up images of women in flat pictorial spaces characterised by dense colour. These paintings became a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement. In them, Rossetti's depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He portrayed his new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism, whilst Jane Burden, the wife of his business partner William Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess. "As in Rossetti's previous reforms, the new kind of subject appeared in the context
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and "The Prince's Progress" (1866). One of Rossetti's most prominent contributions to illustration was the collaborative book, "Poems" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (published by Edward Moxon in 1857 and known colloquially as the 'Moxon Tennyson'). Moxon envisioned Royal Academicians as the illustrators for the ambitious project, but this vision was quickly disrupted once Millais, a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, became involved in the project. Millais recruited William Holman Hunt and Rossetti for the project, and the involvement of these artists reshaped the entire production of the book. In reference to the Pre-Raphaelite illustrations, Laurence Housman wrote “[...] The