Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was born on 12 May 1828 in London, at 38 Charlotte Street, Portland Place. His father, Gabriele Rossetti, was an Italian political refugee and Dante scholar; his mother, Frances Polidori, had trained as a governess and oversaw the children's early education. His siblings included the poet Christina Rossetti and the critic and Pre-Raphaelite historian William Michael Rossetti.

He was educated at King's College School in London, then entered Sass's Drawing Academy in 1841, and moved to the Royal Academy Schools, first as a probationer in 1844 and then as a full student from December 1845. He left the Royal Academy in 1848 without completing a degree. That same year, together with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, he co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of young artists reacting against academic convention in favor of close observation, medieval subject matter, and moral seriousness. His first major oil painting, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, was shown at the Free Exhibition in London in March 1849.

In 1860 Rossetti married the artist and model Elizabeth Siddal at St. Clement's Church, Hastings, after several years together. Their child was stillborn in May 1861, and Siddal died in February 1862 of a laudanum overdose that a coroner ruled accidental. Rossetti continued to paint and publish poetry through the 1860s and 1870s, developing the sensuous, medievalizing female portraits for which he is best known.

His health declined over his final years. He died on 9 April 1882 at Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, a date given by Britannica, Wikipedia, and the Poetry Foundation, though at least one institutional source records 14 April 1882, so the exact day carries some documented uncertainty. Principal biographical sources attribute his decline to Bright's disease, a kidney disorder from which he had suffered for some time; other accounts cite differing explanations, and no single account can be treated as definitive. He was buried at All Saints Parish Churchyard, Birchington-on-Sea, under a memorial cross designed by Ford Madox Brown, with a memorial window by Frederic Shields.

Rossetti's standing rests on his founding role in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and on the afterlife of his style. Tate's curatorial description characterizes his art as marked by sensuality and medieval revivalism, and credits him as a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement whose later work influenced the European Symbolists. Literary historians make a parallel case for his poetry, crediting him with an experimental use of rhythm and refrain and with helping to open a path for writers from Algernon Swinburne to Oscar Wilde. He received no royal or academic honors and never sought election to the Royal Academy; his reputation was built through peer influence, patronage, and sustained institutional collecting rather than formal prizes.

Rossetti's market is entirely secondary. No commercial gallery or estate represents him; his paintings, drawings, and manuscripts move through the major auction houses, principally Sotheby's and Christie's, and through specialist dealers. His best-documented auction high is Proserpine, which sold for GBP 3,274,500 (about USD 5,275,000) at Sotheby's London on 19 November 2013, and was reported at the time as a new record for the artist. Aggregated market databases list a higher price for an unidentified painting, but the work, sale date, and auction house for that figure could not be confirmed in current research, so it is not treated here as the record.

No unified catalogue raisonne of Rossetti's paintings and drawings has been confirmed in current research, so authentication leans on provenance history, the scholarly apparatus of the Rossetti Archive, and the expertise of major auction house departments. There is no representing gallery or estate to consult, and the number of high-value public sales is small, so any single result, including the current confirmed auction high, should be read as an individual data point rather than a stable trend line. His work is concentrated in major museums, Tate, the National Gallery of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and the Fitzwilliam Museum among them, which is the strongest available evidence of his long-term institutional standing.