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

Biography

Born in London, he was a son of immigrant Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti

Gabriele Rossetti

Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti was an Italian poet and scholar who emigrated to England.Born in Vasto in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the original family of his ancestors was Della Guardia...

, and the brother of Maria Francesca Rossetti

Maria Francesca Rossetti

Maria Francesca Rossetti was an English author. She was the sister of artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti as well as William Michael Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti, who dedicated her poem Goblin Market to Maria...

, Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

 and Christina Georgina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti

Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems...

.

He was one of the seven founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti...

 in 1848, and became the movement's unofficial organizer and bibliographer. He edited the Brotherhood's literary magazine The Germ

The Germ (periodical)

The Germ was a periodical established by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to disseminate their ideas. It was not a success, only existing for four issues between January and April 1850....

which published four issues in 1850 and wrote the poetry reviews for it.

It was William Michael Rossetti who recorded the aims of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at their founding meeting in September 1848:

1. To have genuine ideas to express;
2. To study nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;
3. 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;
4. 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

Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He invented the roundel form, wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...

 to James McNeill Whistler

James McNeill Whistler

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger...

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

John Polidori

John William Polidori was an English writer and physician of Italian descent. He is known for his associations with the Romantic movement and credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. His most successful work was the 1819 short story, The Vampyre, the first vampire...

 (author of The Vampyre

The Vampyre

"The Vampyre" is a short story or novella written in 1819 by John William Polidori which is a progenitor of the romantic vampire genre of fantasy fiction...

and physician to Lord Byron), 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

Walt Whitman

Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...

, 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.

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

Ford Madox Brown

Ford Madox Brown was an English painter of moral and historical subjects, notable for his distinctively graphic and often Hogarthian version of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Arguably, his most notable painting was Work...

. 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. 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. Their son Michael died in infancy. 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. 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 Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, and the two corresponded frequently.

Gabriel Arthur, known as Arthur to the family, became a scientist, married Dora Lewis, and had a 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, Imogene Lucy, in 1904.

William Michael Rosetti was a major contributor to the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica

Encyclopædia Britannica

The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...

; 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 historians, mostly writing in German. Below is a quotation from his article on Fra Angelico

Fra Angelico

Fra Angelico , born Guido di Pietro, was an Early Italian Renaissance painter described by 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,......."

Partial book list

• 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. [S.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.

Further information

• Angela Thirlwell. 'William and Lucy: The Other Rossettis'. Yale; ISBN 0-300-10200-3
• Julie L'Enfant. 'William Rossetti's Art Criticism: The Search for Truth in Victorian Art'. University Press of America; ISBN 0-7618-1290-3

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.