Dante Gabriel Rossetti Dante Gabriel Rossetti Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882), generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti (), was a British poet, illustrator, painter and translator, and a member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Rossetti was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. His work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement. Rossetti's art was characterised by its
Dante Gabriel Rossetti illustrations of the Pre-Raphaelites were personal and intellectual readings of the poems to which they belonged, not merely echoes in line of the words of the text.” The Pre-Raphaelites’ visualization of Tennyson’s poems indicated the range of possibilities in interpreting written works, as did their unique approach to visualizing narrative on the canvas. Pre-Raphaelite illustrations do not simply refer to the text in which they appear; rather, they are part of a bigger program of art: the book as a whole. Rossetti’s philosophy about the role of illustration was revealed in an 1855 letter to poet William Allingham, when he