Rossetti and his circle

de Elizabeth Prettejohn

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's house in Chelsea was a Bohemian enclave in Victorian London, the social centre for such rebels as the visionary painter Edward Burne-Jones, the socialist William Morris, the aesthete James McNeill Whistler, and the scandalous poet Charles Swinburne. The rumours it aroused mixed fact and fiction to tell of love affairs between artists and models, of nocturnal rambles and drunken poetry recitations, of the house's collection of Oriental china, medieval musical instruments and exotic animals. But fact or fantasy, the circle's unconventional image was inseparable from their artistic experiments. This book offers new perspectives on the sensual depictions of women, the use of intense color and exotic accessories to heighten sensory experience, the overtones of spirituality and mysticism in the art of Rossetti and his circle. Through their paintings, Rossetti and his friends transformed Bohemian life into a religion of beauty, leading the way toward the Symbolist art of the late nineteenth century.