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
The Day Dream (painting) The Day Dream (painting) The Day Dream or, as it was initially intended to be named, Monna Primavera, is an oil on canvas painting by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founder Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The work, which measures in height by wide, was undertaken in 1880 and depicts Jane Morris posed in a seated position on the bough of a sycamore tree. A small stem of honeysuckle is in her hand, a token of love in the Victorian era, that may be an indication of the secret affair the artist was immersed in with her at the time. The artwork was left