A Christmas Carol

1850s

A new watercolour and pen-and-ink technique

Translations of Italian poetry and Malory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur” inspired Rossetti’s art of the 1850s: he created a method of painting in watercolours with thick pigments mixed with gum to give rich effects like medieval illuminations, and developed a novel pen-and-ink drawing technique.

1856–1857

Meets Morris and Burne-Jones

Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, who did not know Rossetti but were much influenced by his works, met him by recruiting him as a contributor to their Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which Morris founded in 1856; in February 1857 Rossetti wrote that they had become very intimate friends of his and called Burne-Jones’s designs marvels of finish.

1857

The Burden sisters sit for the murals

For the Oxford Union murals Rossetti recruited two sisters, Bessie and Jane Burden, as models; Jane became Morris’s wife in 1859.

1857

Illustrations for the “Moxon Tennyson”

In 1857 Rossetti contributed two illustrations to Edward Moxon’s edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Poems; the publisher had envisioned Royal Academicians as illustrators, but once Millais became involved and recruited Hunt and Rossetti, the whole production of the book was reshaped.

c. 1860

A new course: powerful close-ups of women

Around 1860 Rossetti returned to oil painting, abandoning the dense medieval compositions of the 1850s in favour of powerful close-up images of women in flat pictorial spaces of dense colour; these drew not on medievalism but on the Venetian High Renaissance artists Titian and Veronese, and became a major influence on European Symbolism.

23 maggio 1860

Married: Elizabeth Siddal