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THE ENGLISH SCHOOL
For information and facts about
famous artists from England,
see the following:
William Hogarth (1697-1764)
Painter, Engraver, Satirist
Richard Wilson (1714-82)
First top English landscape painter
Joshua Reynolds (1723-92)
Portraitist, President Royal Academy
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88)
Portrait Painter, Landscapes
Henry Fuseli (1741-1825)
Romantic expressionist painter
William Blake (1757-1827)
Watercolourist, Illustrator, Engraver
John Constable (1776-1837)
Naturalist landscape painter
Thomas Girtin (1775-1802)
First major watercolourist.
JMW Turner (1775-1851)
Impressionistic landscape art
English School
of landscape painting
18th and 19th century movement
Alfred Stevens (1817-75)
Sculpture, decorative art
GF Watts (1817-1904)
Portrait painter, muralist
William Morris (1834-96)
Leader of Arts & Crafts Movement
Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98)
Art Nouveau illustrator.
WORLD'S
GREATEST ART
For a list of the finest works of
painting and sculpture, by the
world's most famous artists, see:
Greatest Paintings Ever
Oils, watercolours, mixed media
by top painters: 1300-present.
WORLDS TOP ARTISTS
Best Artists of All Time.
For the greatest view painters, see:
Best Landcape Artists.
For the greatest still life art, see:
Best Still Life Painters.
For the greatest portraitists
see: Best Portrait Artists.
For the greatest genre-painting, see:
Best Genre Painters.
For the top allegorical painting,
see: Best History Painters.
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In 1848, he sought additional instruction
in fine art painting, first from
Ford Madox Brown, an artist of brilliant promise, and then from Holman
Hunt, and it was under Hunt's supervision that his first picture "The
Girlhood of the Virgin", was painted. It was delicately and timidly
painted in the Pre-Raphaelite manner, but there were traces in it of early
Christian influence derived through Madox Brown from the German Pre-Raphaelites.
"The Annunciation" of the following year had the same
characteristics, though it was more confidently painted. In its way it
is a masterpiece. In "Found", a modern subject with a moral,
he made his most serious effort to give expression to the Pre-Raphaelite
aims, but this picture, though he worked on it at intervals throughout
his life, was never finished.
In 1850, he met his muse, Elizabeth Siddal
whom he lived with and painted untiringly until her death in 1862.
The personal qualities of Rossetti's art are most clearly seen in the
small water-colours of romantic subjects painted between 1852 and 1862.
Though their subjects are literary they are more than mere illustrations,
and despite their medieval atmosphere they are by no means archaistic
imitations of medieval art. These small pictures of a fantastic imaginary
world have the same compelling glamour as Rossetti's poetry, and they
are realized with a vivid intensity which is unique. Rossetti had an unsurpassable
gift for colour, and these drawings
glow with a variegated fire which reminds one of stained glass, the likeness
to which is increased by the way in which the colour is mapped out into
flat or almost flat decorative shapes. The few designs for windows which
he made, show the admirable grasp of the possibilities of the medium which
these drawings lead one to expect, and it is to be regretted that he did
not himself practise the craft of stained
glass. If he had, he would surely have produced work which could bear
comparison in colour and design with the masterpieces of medieval glass-painting.
"Dante drawing the Angel" (Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford), "Lancelot and Guinevere", "Mary in the
House of St. John", "The Blue Closet", "The Tune of
Seven Towers", and "The Christmas Carol", are typical of
this, Rossetti's best period, and his altar-piece for Llandaff Cathedral,
a large work in oils, has the same atmosphere. See also English
Figurative Painting 18th/19th century.
From 1862 onwards his work consisted mainly of large, half-length female
figures of a sensuous and highly emotional type, in which certain mannerisms
of form are developed to an unpleasant degree. Tragic happenings in his
private life (the death of Elizabeth Siddal) had had a disastrous effect
on his art, and many of these later pictures are the work of a tortured
soul - to some experts, at least. The details are perhaps rather more
mundane.
In 1863, he moved into a new house in Chelsea
with his new model Fanny Cornforth, and a growing menagerie of unsual
animals, including a wombat, whose premature death occasioned a poem.
By this time his earnings from his oil paintings
were rising nicely (he had a huge income of over £3,000 a year),
and he had been given a partnership in the interior design firm of his
fellow pre-Raphaelite William Morris (1834-96) that produced stained glass,
furniture, wallpaper and printed textiles. However, Morris' wife, Janey,
became another of his mistresses and models, a situation which caused
great tension between Rossetti and Morris, ending in an acrimonious split
in 1875. Meantime, during the course of the 1860s, Rossetti gradually
became torn between his women, his poetry, his desire to produce interesting
watercolours and the need to
earn a living. Feeling increasingly pressurized, despite growing public
recognition and considerable acclaim following the publication of "Poems
by DG Rossetti" as Britain's No 1 artist-poet, he took to drink and
drugs. In 1872, he tried and failed to commit suicide, recovering but
never regaining his full physical and mental health.
Rossetti was a man of huge contrasts. He
spurned academic drawing
traditions, but succeeded in becoming a brilliant draughtsman. He was
a fine poet but also in many ways a reckless cynic. He produced some spectacular
oils, along with a series of wonderfully romantic
medieval-subject watercolours (inspiring a second wave of Pre-Raphaelitism),
but also produced a quantity of lower quality works of sensuous, pouting
femme fatales: (though even these inspired the Symbolists and fin
de siecle decadents). He was a commanding personality and a hard businessman,
yet he ended his life depressed, prematurely aged and paralyzed. Perhaps
his greatest quality was his fine feeling for colour, which - as shown
by later works like "Beata Beatrix", painted as a memorial to
Elizabeth Siddal, and the portrait of Mrs. William Morris - never left
him.
Works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti hang in
some of the best art museums around the
world.
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