Vernon Lushington Thomas Hughes, and Richard Buckley Litchfield, became a unifying force at the College. He was a friend to artists, authors and activists, particularly those of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Arts and Crafts Movement who gravitated to the Working Men's College. In 1856, it was he who first introduced Edward Burne-Jones to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his college rooms. Rossetti used Lushington’s wife, Jane, as a model in 1865. Lushington, friend of William Morris, was a frequent visitor to Kelmscott Manor. He was a close friend of Leslie Stephen and his family; Stephen’s daughter Virginia (later Woolf) based her character
Paolo and Francesca da Rimini Paolo and Francesca da Rimini Paolo and Francesca da Rimini is a watercolour by English artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painted in 1855 and currently housed at Tate Britain. Rossetti's real name was Charles Gabriel Dante Rossetti, but his admiration for the great Florentine poet led him to change it to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and he proceeded to sign all his work so. In the specific, the very subject of this painting is taken from Dante Aligheri's "Inferno", Canto V – it is a small watercolour triptych executed in the archaic, medievalising style of this period in Rossetti's art,