Art making is often one of those “Danger zones” for us. Why? Because creating involves entering a state of surrender and often unknowing. We can’t always predict how our painting is going to evolve, in fact, if we can predict it all, it is often a joyless act. Therefore, it is customary for our inner critic to get her feathers ruffled when we don’t have all the answers, when we run the risk of making mistakes or at worse looking like a fool! To the inner critic, these things all lead to one thing – PAIN and rejection. When we understand this about our inner critic we can see the beautiful intention it holds. It is trying to protect us. It is trying to keep us safe. How can we hate this part of ourselves? Do you hate a child when they are scared of the monsters in the dark? Of course not. We embrace that child, we cradle them and soothe them. We illuminate the shadows with a nightlight. We reassure them and tell them it’s going to be alright. THIS is how we need to treat our critics. This is where we can give our critics (ourselves) grace. If we can be aware enough to see this part of ourselves in a new way we can send it love and forgiveness. Comfort.

This is yet another beautiful gift of the artist’s path – we get the opportunity to create beauty AND heal our dear critic. Will this mean that our critical voice will be silenced? No probably not, but our relationship with this aspect of self can greatly improve and when the voice becomes quieter we are more able to move forward in our creative process.
So as you enter into creating, filled with gratitude and with your heart open, embrace your critic with grace and compassion. Hold the part of yourself that is scared. Turn on a night light and keep going.

This month, with our focus on gratitude and grace, I couldn’t help but choose an artist and art period that I’m truly grateful for – The Pre-Raphaelites and their founder – Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This movement and their leader greatly influenced my journey as an artist and this art still brings me incredible joy and inspiration. I hope you will discover or reconnect with a similar appreciation of this outstanding art.

So let’s learn a little bit more about dear Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement –

OVERVIEW – Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882), generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator, and 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 sensuality and its medieval revivalism. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterised by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence, The House of Life. Poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossetti’s work. He frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, spanning from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Astarte Syriaca (1877), while also creating art to illustrate poems such as Goblin Market by the celebrated poet Christina Rossetti, his sister.

Rossetti’s personal life was closely linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and muses Elizabeth Siddal (whom he married), Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris.

EARLY LIFE – Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the son of Italian scholar, Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti and his wife Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti was born in London, on 12 May 1828. His family and friends called him Gabriel, but in publications he put the name Dante first in honour of Dante Alighieri.
He was the brother of poet Christina Rossetti, critic William Michael Rossetti, and author Maria Francesca Rossetti. The youthful Rossetti is described as “self-possessed, articulate, passionate and charismatic”] but also “ardent, poetic and feckless”. Like all his siblings, he aspired to be a poet and attended King’s College School, in its original location near the Strand in London.

He also wished to be a painter, having shown a great interest in Medieval Italian art. He studied at Henry Sass’ Drawing Academy from 1841 to 1845, when he enrolled in the Antique School of the Royal Academy, which he left in 1848. After leaving the Royal Academy, Rossetti studied under Ford Madox Brown, with whom he retained a close relationship throughout his life.

Following the exhibition of William Holman Hunt’s painting The Eve of St. Agnes, Rossetti sought out Hunt’s friendship. The painting illustrated a poem by John Keats. Rossetti’s own poem, “The Blessed Damozel”, was an imitation of Keats, and he believed Hunt might share his artistic and literary ideals. Together they developed the philosophy of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which they founded along with John Everett Millais.

THE GIRLHOOD OF MARY VIRGIN – 1849

MAIDS OF ELFEN-MERE

For many years, Rossetti worked on English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova (published as The Early Italian Poets in 1861). These and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur inspired his art of the 1850s. He created a method of painting in watercolours, using thick pigments mixed with gum to give rich effects similar to medieval illuminations.

He also developed a novel drawing technique in pen-and-ink. His first published illustration was “The Maids of Elfen-Mere” (1855), for a poem by his friend William Allingham, and he contributed two illustrations to Edward Moxon’s 1857 edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Poems and illustrations for works by his sister Christina Rossetti.

Around 1860, Rossetti returned to oil painting, abandoning the dense medieval compositions of the 1850s in favor of powerful close-up images of women in flat pictorial spaces characterised by dense color. 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 Morris, the wife of his business partner William Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess.

BEATA BEATRIX – 1864

In 1865, he discovered auburn-haired Alexa Wilding, a dressmaker and would-be actress who was engaged to model for him on a full-time basis and sat for Veronica Veronese, The Blessed Damozel, A Sea–Spell, and other paintings. She sat for more of his finished works than any other model, but comparatively little is known about her due to the lack of any romantic connection with Rossetti.

PROSERPINE – 1874

During these years, Rossetti was prevailed upon by friends, in particular Charles Augustus Howell, to exhume his poems from his wife’s grave which he did, collating and publishing them in 1870 in the volume Poems by D. G. Rossetti. They created quite the controversy since the collection had themes of eroticism and sensuality.

Critics harshly commented on the poems, although historically, it was Rossetti’s most substantial literary achievement.

Here’s a Pinterest board full of his work to inspire you!

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (later known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner who formed a seven-member “Brotherhood”.

The Brotherhood was only ever a loose association and their principles were shared by other artists of the time, including Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes and Marie Spartali Stillman. Later followers of the principles of the Brotherhood included Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and John William Waterhouse.

The group sought a return to the abundant detail, intense colours and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian art. They rejected what they regarded as the mechanistic approach first adopted by Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. The Brotherhood believed the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on the academic teaching of art, hence the name “Pre-Raphaelite”.

In particular, the group objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts, whom they called “Sir Sloshua”. To the Pre-Raphaelites, according to William Michael Rossetti, “sloshy” meant “anything lax or scamped in the process of painting … and hence … any thing or person of a commonplace or conventional kind”. The group associated their work with John Ruskin, an English critic whose influences were driven by his religious background. Christian themes were abundant.

• The Brotherhood’s early doctrines were expressed in four declarations:
• To have genuine ideas to express;
• To study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;
• To sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parodying and learned by rote;
• And, most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.

SOUL OF THE ROSE

BY JOHN WILLIAM WATERHOUSE – 1903

1. IDEALIZED WOMEN

Most of the Pre-Raphaelite characters are women whose beauty is based on real-life mistresses and models of the English painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He was the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a secret art society. His most prominent muses were Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, Alexa Wilding and Jane Morris, all of whom conform to a certain feminine archetype, known to the Pre-Raphaelites as the “stunner.” She’s a very tall woman depicted in a stiff pose with loose and long flowing red hair in a variety of shades. Also, she’s got a long, straight nose, a strong jawline, sturdy, long neck and full, pouty lips. Usually, she’s heavy-lidded with a dreamy, distant look in her eyes. Her face shows a melancholy, yet calm expression with a wistful gaze that seems as if you’ve just caught her in the middle of an otherworldly experience. Her ethereal beauty and billowing garments, occasionally in a flowery setting, makes her look like a lone maiden from a medieval fairy tale.

2. TIES TO LITERATURE

Most Pre-Raphaelite works were inspired by mythological and biblical stories, and medieval tales (Arthurian legends, for example). Also, literature such as Shakespearean plays and Alfred Tennyson’s poems provided a rich source of subject matter.

3. STARK RELIGIOUS REALITY

With bold irreverence to the religious sensibilities of the time, or even beauty ideals, they painted biblical themes in a harsh, realistic manner. That harkens back to Baroque religious paintings but with a softer, brighter palette.

The Pre-Raphaelites used bright transparent colors (at the time regarded as garish) and were applied in thin glazes onto a smooth, white ground, most often canvas. Using a white ground, rather than a colored one, gives luminosity to a painting. Building up color through glazes, imitates the effect of light falling on a subject and gives a depth that cannot be obtained by using colors mixed on a palette.

One of the Brotherhood’s members, William Holman Hunt wrote: “For the sake of avoiding the contamination of hue resulting from the use of palettes only partially cleaned from earlier work, we used white porcelain tablets which would betray any remains of dried paint that would otherwise infallibly work up into tints that would need to be of pristine purity. We knew how impossible it was to give the purity and variety of nature’s hues if we allowed our pigments to get sullied.”

Millais and Hunt reversed the establishment’s order of painting, creating backgrounds first, plein air, then putting in the figures in their studios. Compositions were generally worked out directly on the canvas, drawn with graphite pencil.

Form was built meticulously using small brushes. Hunt said: “I tried to put aside the loose irresponsible handling to which I had been trained.”

The final touch was a high-gloss varnish, which emphasized the fact that the painting was done in oils, the most valued of mediums, and helped protect the surface.

The Pre-Raphaelites used bright transparent colors (at the time regarded as garish) and were applied in thin glazes onto a smooth, white ground, most often canvas. Using a white ground, rather than a colored one, gives luminosity to a painting. Building up color through glazes, imitates the effect of light falling on a subject and gives a depth that cannot be obtained by using colors mixed on a palette.

One of the Brotherhood’s members, William Holman Hunt wrote: “For the sake of avoiding the contamination of hue resulting from the use of palettes only partially cleaned from earlier work, we used white porcelain tablets which would betray any remains of dried paint that would otherwise infallibly work up into tints that would need to be of pristine purity. We knew how impossible it was to give the purity and variety of nature’s hues if we allowed our pigments to get sullied.”

Millais and Hunt reversed the establishment’s order of painting, creating backgrounds first, plein air, then putting in the figures in their studios. Compositions were generally worked out directly on the canvas, drawn with graphite pencil.

Form was built meticulously using small brushes. Hunt said: “I tried to put aside the loose irresponsible handling to which I had been trained.”

The final touch was a high-gloss varnish, which emphasized the fact that the painting was done in oils, the most valued of mediums, and helped protect the surface.

To recreate a typical jewel toned Pre-Raphaelite palette, use the following colors: cobalt blue, ultramarine, emerald green, madder (a modern alternative such as alizarin crimson), earth colors (ochres, siennas, umbers), plus the characteristic Pre-Raphaelite purple made from mixing cobalt blue with madder.

Pre-Raphaelite Artists to Explore –

• William Holman Hunt
• John Everett Millais
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti
• James Collinson
• Ford Madox Brown
• Arthur Hughes
• Edward Burne-Jones
• William Morris
• John William Waterhouse

We cannot discuss Pre-Raphaelite art without noting the incredible impact that many women had on the movement. Some modeled for the brotherhood and served as mistresses and muses but these women had their own creative contributions to offer this time in history. From poetry, illustration, textile design and paintings the women aligned with this movement are too often overlooked. Now, they are referred to as the The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood and their works have been exhibited globally.

ELGIVA

JOANNA MARY BOYCE – 1855

MADONNA AND CHILD

BY MARIANNE STOKES – 1907

HERE ARE A FEW Artists to Explore –

• Elizabeth (Lizzie) Siddal (model & artist & poet)
• Evelyn De Morgan (artist)
• Christina Rossetti (poet)tor)
• Marie Spartali Stillman (artist and model)
• Joanna Mary Boyce (artist)
• Jane Morris (model and embroidery artist)
• Emma Sandys (artist)
• Marianne Stokes (artist)

I’ve curated a Pinterest board with some of these women’s creations for you:

The Pre-Raphaelites kinda had a thing for red haired women! You will notice this in their paintings and well, I have to admit, I also admire the beauty of long red hair…so I took this opportunity to do another Master study of a famous Pre-Raphaelite redhead by John Everett Millais – “The Bridesmaid”,1851. I was a bit concerned that I had bit off more than I could chew with this one but I went for it. I worked in oils and once I had transferred my sketch I added a thin layer of linseed oil so I could work wet into wet, as Millais had done. I painted on a very small 5” x 7” hardwood panel building the painting in thin layers. It was an absolute joy to create.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti studies

BY: DEBORAH THODEN