Dante Gabriel Rossetti — Profile, Rankings & Fame Trend

Summary

Updated 2026-06-09

He painted women like prayers and wrote poems like spells, then buried his unpublished verses with his dead wife—only to dig them up seven years later when he needed them for a book.

Biography

About

Dante Gabriel Rossetti founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, a revolt against academic painting that looked back to medieval intensity and forward to Symbolism. His early work paired poetry influenced by Keats and Blake with paintings like The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849), often writing sonnets to accompany his own pictures. From around 1860 his style thickened into something darker and more sumptuous—dense Italian Renaissance color, single female figures pulled from a small circle of models, backgrounds lush with vegetation. His mu…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

said1881

I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet, keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

— Sudden Light, st. 1 (1881).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

said1870

I am not as these are, the poet saithIn youth's pride, and the painter, among menAt bay, where never pencil comes nor pem

— from Not As These in The House of Life 1870 kindle ebook ASIN B0082R81E8

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

said1870

From perfect grief there need not beWisdom or even memory; One thing then learned remains to me —The woodspurge has a cup of three.

— The Woodspurge, st. 4 (1870).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

said1870

Tell me now in what hidden way isLady Flora the lovely Roman? Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thais, Neither of them the fairer woman?

— The Ballad of Dead Ladies, st. 1 (1870).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

saidundated

If God in his wisdom have brought closeThe day when I must die, That day by water or fire or airMy feet shall fall in the destined snare Wherever my road may lie.

— The King's Tragedy, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

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