William Michael Rossetti (25 September 1829 – 5 February 1919) was an English writer and critic.

Early life

Born in London, Rossetti was a son of

exile Exile or banishment is primarily penal expulsion from one's native country, and secondarily expatriation or prolonged absence from one's homeland under either the compulsion of circumstance or the rigors of some high purpose. Usually persons ...

d Italian scholar

Gabriele Rossetti Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti (28 February 1783 – 24 April 1854) was an Italian nobleman, poet, constitutionalist, scholar, and founder of the secret society Carbonari. Rossetti was born in Vasto in the Kingdom of Naples. He was a R ...

and his wife Frances Rossetti ''née'' Polidori; he was the brother of Maria Francesca Rossetti,

Dante Gabriel Rossetti Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882), generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti ( ; ), was an English poet, illustrator, painter, translator, and member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brother ...

and Christina Georgina Rossetti.

Career

He was one of the seven founder members of the

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), 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 Rossett ...

in 1848, and became the movement's unofficial organizer and bibliographer. He edited the Brotherhood's literary magazine '' The Germ'' which published four issues in 1850. Rossetti wrote the poetry reviews for this magazine. It was William Michael Rossetti who recorded the aims of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at their founding meeting in September 1848: #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-parading and learned by rote; #And most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues. Although Rossetti worked full-time as a civil servant, he maintained a prolific output of criticism and biography across a range of interests from

Algernon Swinburne Algernon Charles Swinburne (5 April 1837 – 10 April 1909) was an English poet, playwright, novelist and critic. He wrote many plays – all tragedies – and collections of poetry such as '' Poems and Ballads'', and contributed to the Eleve ...

James McNeill Whistler James Abbott McNeill Whistler (; July 10, 1834July 17, 1903) was an American painter in oils and watercolor, and printmaker, active during the American Gilded Age and based primarily in the United Kingdom. He eschewed sentimentality and moral a ...

. He edited the diaries of his maternal uncle John William Polidori (author of ''

The Vampyre "The Vampyre" is a short work of prose fiction written in 1819 by John William Polidori, taken from the story told by Lord Byron as part of a contest among Polidori, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley. The same contest produced the n ...

'' and physician to

Lord Byron George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824) was an English poet. He is one of the major figures of the Romantic movement, and is regarded as being among the greatest poets of the United Kingdom. Among his best-kno ...

), a comprehensive biography of D. G. Rossetti, and edited the collected works of D. G. Rossetti and Christina Rossetti. Rossetti edited the first British edition of the poetry of

Walt Whitman Walter Whitman Jr. (; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, and journalist; he also wrote two novels. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American literature and world literature. Whitman incor ...

, which was published in 1868; however, this edition was bowdlerized. Anne Gilchrist, who became one of the first to write about Whitman, first read his poetry from Rossetti's edition, and Rossetti helped initiate their correspondence. William Michael Rossetti was a major contributor to the 1911 edition of the ''

Encyclopædia Britannica The is a general knowledge, general-knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It has been published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. since 1768, although the company has changed ownership seven times. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, ...

''; his contributions on artistic subjects were criticised by many reviewers at the time and since, as showing little evidence of having absorbed the mounting body of work by academic

art historian Art history is the study of artistic works made throughout human history. Among other topics, it studies art’s formal qualities, its impact on societies and cultures, and how artistic styles have changed throughout history. Traditionally, the ...

s, mostly writing in German. Below is a quotation from his article on

Fra Angelico Fra Angelico, O.P. (; ; born Guido di Pietro; 18 February 1455) was a Dominican friar and Italian Renaissance painter of the Early Renaissance, described by Giorgio Vasari in his ''Lives of the Artists'' as having "a rare and perfect talent" ...

demonstrating his literary and art-historical style:

The "pietistic" quality of Fra Angelico's work is in fact its predominant characteristic. The faces of his figures have an air of rapt suavity, devotional fervency and beaming esoteric consciousness, which is intensely attractive to some minds ... the faces becoming sleek and prim, with a smirk of sexless religiosity which hardly eludes the artificial or even the hypocritical; because of this, there are some who are not moved by his work. Even so, Fra Angelico is a notable artist within his sphere.Rossetti, William Michael. "Angelico, Fra". 1911 ''Encyclopædia Britannica''.

Personal life

In 1874 he married Lucy Madox Brown, daughter of the painter

Ford Madox Brown Ford Madox Brown (16 April 1821 – 6 October 1893) was a British painter of moral and historical subjects, notable for his distinctively graphic and often William Hogarth, Hogarthian version of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Arguably, his mos ...

. They honeymooned in France and Italy. Their first child, Olivia Frances Madox, was born in September 1875, and her birth was celebrated in an ode of Swinburne's. A son, Gabriel Arthur, was born in February 1877, followed by another daughter, Helen Maria, in November 1879, and twins, Mary Elizabeth and Michael Ford, in April 1881. Rossetti and his wife did not have the children baptized, nor were they raised in a Christian household. The children were schooled at home by their mother and governesses. Their son Michael died in infancy. In 1897, Olivia married an Italian anarchist refugee, Antonio Agresti. They later moved to Italy, where Olivia became a translator and writer. After she was widowed in 1926, she became an associate of

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an List of poets from the United States, American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Ita ...

, and the two corresponded frequently. Gabriel Arthur, known as Arthur to the family, became a scientist, married Dora Lewis, and had several children. Helen became a painter of miniatures, and in 1903 married Gastone Angeli. He was in fragile health and died only a few months later. Helen gave birth to his posthumous daughter, Imogen Lucy, in 1904. In 1903, Helen and Olivia also published ''A Girl Among the Anarchists'' under the pseudonym 'Isabel Meredith'; the novel is a fictional recounting of their experiences in the anarchist movement. William Michael Rossetti died on 5 February 1919 aged 89 and is buried in the Rossetti family grave on the west side of Highgate Cemetery. In the grave he joined his father, mother,

Elizabeth Siddal Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (25 July 1829 – 11 February 1862), better known as Elizabeth Siddal (a spelling she adopted in 1853), was an English artist, art model, and poet. Siddal was perhaps the most significant of the female models who pos ...

(wife of his brother Dante) and his sister Christina. The ashes of his son Gabriel Arthur Maddox were interred in the grave in 1932 and three other members of the Rossetti family have also been buried there subsequently.

Partial bibliography

*Rossetti, W. M. (1850)
''The Germ: thoughts towards nature in poetry, literature, and art''
London: Aylott & Jones. *Rossetti, W. M. (1869)
''Essays on early Italian and German books of Courtesy''
London: Trübner. *Rossetti, W. M. (1876)
''Walt Whitman''
London: s.n. *Rossetti, W. M. (1878)
''Lives of famous poets from Chaucer to Longfellow: with lists of minor poets whose biographies are not included''
.l. Ward. *Rossetti, W. M. (1880)
''American poetry: a representative collection of the best verse by American writers''
London: Ward, Lock. *Rossetti, W. M. (1886)
''Memoir of Percy Bysshe Shelley''
London: Slark. *Rossetti, W. M. (1889)
''Dante Gabriel Rossetti as designer and writer''
London: Cassell & Company, limited.

References

External links

* *
Oscar Wilde, Joseph Worcester and the Arts & Crafts Movement
with a "sonnet" by Rossetti establishing the principles behind the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
The Pre-Raph Pack
Discover more about the artists, the techniques they used and a timeline spanning 100 years.
William Michael Rossetti Papers

John Rylands Library The John Rylands Research Institute and Library is a Victorian era, late-Victorian Gothic Revival architecture, neo-Gothic building on Deansgate in Manchester, England. It is part of the University of Manchester. The library, which opened to t ...

, Manchester * William Michael Rossetti Collection. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. {{DEFAULTSORT:Rossetti, William Michael 1829 births 1919 deaths English people of Italian descent Polidori–Rossetti family Writers from London People educated at King's College School, London English male journalists People associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Burials at Highgate Cemetery Victorian writers 19th-century English non-fiction writers William Michael Translators of Dante Alighieri