12th May: Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born on this date in 1828. Here are some facts about him you may not have known.

1. Rossetti was born in London, the son of Italian immigrants. He was the brother of poet Christina Rossetti, critic William Michael Rossetti, and author Maria Francesca Rossetti.
2. He was a painter and a poet. He often wrote sonnets to go along with his paintings, and illustrated his sister Christina's poems.
3. He was a founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais.
4. He didn't react well to criticism. After critics panned his second major painting in 1850, he switched to watercolours which he could sell privately and only rarely exhibited after that. Later in his life, the unfavourable reaction of critics to his first published poetry collection contributed to a mental breakdown during which he became addicted to chloral and Whiskey.
5. He married one of his models, Elizabeth Siddal, in 1860. She died in 1862 after giving birth to a stillborn child. When she died, Rossetti, who was suffering from depression at the time, buried most of his unpublished poems with her. He later had the poems dug up and published them in a collection in 1870.
6. Aside from his wife, Rossetti used several models, many of whom he was also romantically involved with, including Fanny Comforth, Jane Morris (wife of his friend William Morris), and Alexa Wilding, a dressmaker and aspiring actress who he approached after spotting her in the street. They became lifelong friends and she would later regularly leave flowers on his grave, but little is known about her because they weren't romantically involved.
7. Rossetti contributed designs for stained glass and other decorative objects made by the decorative arts firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, of which he was a founding partner. He was fired in 1874 when Morris reorganised the firm.
8. Dinner at Rossetti's place would have been somewhat surreal. Rossetti was fascinated by exotic animals, Wombats in particular. He spent hours watching them at London Zoo, and went on to have two of them as pets. He let his pet wombat sleep in the middle of the dinner table during meals. As well as the wombats, he bought a llama and a toucan. He dressed the toucan in a cowboy hat and trained it to ride the llama round the dining-table.
9. He died of Bright's Disease, a disease of the kidneys, on Easter Sunday, 1882. He'd been housebound and addicted to chloral and alcohol for years (he drank whisky to take away the taste of the chloral), and had gone to the country to try and improve his health.
10. On screen, Rossetti has been portrayed by Oliver Reed, Ben Kingsley and Aidan Turner.