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
Charles Augustus Howell Charles Augustus Howell Charles Augustus Howell (10 March 1840 – 21 April 1890) was an art dealer and alleged blackmailer who is best known for persuading the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti to dig up the poems he buried with his wife Elizabeth Siddal. His reputation as a blackmailer inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton". Howell was born in Oporto, Portugal to an English father, Alfred William Hervey Howell, and a Portuguese mother. He claimed to have aristocratic Portuguese ancestry, and would wear a red ribbon of the Portuguese Order of Christ, which he