Works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti began with thinly painted religious scenes and pen drawings for poems; from about 1860 he painted women in close-up, usually a single figure posed by one of a few regular models, pressed against flowers, tiles and heavy cloth.

In Ecce Ancilla Domini, signed March 1850, the Annunciation happens in a white room: Mary, a red-haired girl, shrinks back on her bed while Gabriel, flames at his feet, holds out a lily; gold haloes, a blue hanging and a red embroidered cloth give the main colours. Stung by the critics, Rossetti turned to watercolours sold privately and seldom exhibited again. He also worked out his own way with pen and ink: in the drawing for his first published illustration, The Maids of Elfen-Mere, three long-haired women spin above a youth hunched on the floor, and for his sister Christina's Goblin Market he drew goblin men with animal heads pressing fruit on a girl who fingers a lock of her hair.

He often wrote a sonnet to go with a picture. In Proserpine of 1874 a panel of verse sits in the top corner, above a woman in a blue-green dress holding a split pomegranate beside a trail of ivy. The auburn-haired Alexa Wilding, a dressmaker he spotted in the Strand in 1865, was the model he used most for finished pictures, among them A Sea-Spell, where she plucks strings under apple boughs with pink flowers in her hair. Beata Beatrix recalls his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, dead of a laudanum overdose in 1862: a haloed red dove drops a white poppy into her hands as she sits with closed eyes, in what Rossetti insisted was a trance, not death.

Sources: Wikipedia, Tate Britain, Harvard Art Museums, Yale Center for British Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, National Gallery.