The later years of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

From 1860 onward, trials were part of Rossetti’s much-disturbed life. His marriage to Elizabeth Siddal, clouded by her constant ill health, ended tragically in 1862 with her death from an overdose of laudanum. Grief led him to bury with her the only complete manuscript of his poems. That he considered his love for his wife similar to Dante’s mystical and idealized love for Beatrice is evident from the symbolic Beata Beatrix, painted in 1863 and now in the Tate Gallery.

Rossetti’s life and art were now greatly changed. He moved from riverside premises in London’s Blackfriars to Chelsea. The influence of new friends—Algernon Charles Swinburne and the American painter James McNeill Whistler—led to a more aesthetic and sensuous approach to art. Literary themes gave way to pictures of mundane beauties, such as his mistress, Fanny Cornforth, gorgeously appareled and painted with a command of oils he had not previously shown. Among these works are The Blessed Damozel (1871–79), The Bower Meadow (1872), Proserpine (1874), and La Pia de’ Tolomei (1881). The luxuriant colours and rhythmic design of these paintings enhance the effect of their languid, sensuous female subjects, all of whom bear a distinctive Pre-Raphaelite facial type. The paintings proved popular with collectors, and Rossetti grew affluent enough to employ studio assistants to make copies and replicas. He also collected antiques and filled his large Chelsea garden with a menagerie of animals and birds.

Rossetti had enjoyed a modest success in 1861 with his published translations, The Early Italian Poets; and toward the end of the 1860s his thoughts turned to poetry again. He began composing new poems and planned the recovery of the manuscript poems buried with his wife in Highgate Cemetery. Carried out in 1869 through the agency of his unconventional man of business, Charles Augustus Howell, the exhumation visibly distressed the superstitious Rossetti. The publication of these poems followed in 1870. The Poems were well enough received until a misdirected, savage onslaught by “Thomas Maitland” (pseudonym of the journalist-critic Robert Buchanan) on “The Fleshly School of Poetry” singled out Rossetti for attack. Rossetti responded temperately in “The Stealthy School of Criticism,” published in the Athenaeum; but the attack, combined with remorse and the amount of chloral and alcohol he now took for insomnia, brought about his collapse in 1872. He recovered sufficiently to paint and write, but his life in Chelsea was subsequently that of a semi-invalid and recluse. Until 1874 he spent much time at Kelmscott Manor (near Oxford), of which he took joint tenancy with William Morris in 1871. His lovingly idealized portraits of Jane Morris at this time were a return to his more poetic and mystical style.

In the early 1880s Rossetti occupied himself with a replica of an early watercolour, Dante’s Dream (1880), a revised edition of Poems (1881), and Ballads and Sonnets (1881), containing the completed sonnet sequence of “The House of Life,” in which he described the love between man and woman with tragic intensity. The lawyer and man of letters Theodore Watts-Dunton meanwhile did his best to put Rossetti’s financial affairs in order. From a visit to Keswick (in northwestern England) in 1881, Rossetti returned in worse health than before, and he died the following spring.