The Blue bower

by Paul Spencer-Longhurst

"Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) is best known for his contribution to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, of which he was a founding member in 1848. By 1853 he and his colleagues, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, had gone their separate ways and Rossetti retreated into a medieval fantasy world. He concentrated on themes from the life and works of his namesake Dante Alighieri and from Malory's legends of King Arthur, depicting these and other poetic subjects exclusively in watercolour. In 1859 his art changed again. He reverted to oil-painting and produced a series of idealized and symbolic portraits of 'stunners' - beautiful women shown at close range in exotic settings - who were to become his staple subject matter for the rest of his career. Rossetti's themes emphasize the female domination of men, often linking it with male destruction.^ His symbolic use of flowers and of motifs drawn from Japanese and Oriental art in these 'subjectless' pictures mark him out as a founder