William Michael Rossetti

William Michael Rossetti

From Wikipaedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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, and the brother of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti.

He was one of the seven founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, and became the movement's unofficial organizer and bibliographer. He edited the Brotherhood's literary magazine The Germ 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:

To have genuine ideas to express; To study nature attentively, so as to know how to express them; 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; 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 to James McNeill Whistler. He edited the diaries of his maternal uncle John William Polidori (author of The Vampyre 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, which was published in 1868; however, this edition was bowdlerized.[1] 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.[2]

In 1874 he married Lucy Madox Brown, daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown. 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, 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 Encyclopedia Britannica; 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 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,......." [3] [edit] See alsoRossetti-Polidori family tree [edit] References^ Belasco, Susan; Folsom, Ed; Price, Kenneth M. (2007), Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays, University of Nebraska Press, ISBN 0803260008, http://books.google.com/?id=JtTrqDHgj5oC&pg=PA101 ^ Robertson, Michael (2008), Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples, Princeton University Press, p. 62, ISBN 0691128081, http://books.google.com/?id=YhU6AjeVDIAC&pg=PA62 ^ Rossetti, William Michael. Angelico, Fra. 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. [edit] Partial book listRossetti, 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. [edit] Further informationAngela 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 [edit] External links Wikisource has original works written by or about: William Michael Rossetti Works by William Michael Rossetti at Project Gutenberg 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.

family

Born in London, he was a son of immigrant Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti and his wife Frances Rossetti née Polidori, and the brother of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti.

In 1874 he married Lucy Madox Brown, daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown. They honeymooned in France and Italy.

Their children:

• Olivia Frances Madox, was born in September 1875, and her birth was celebrated in an ode of Swinburne's. . 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, and the two corresponded frequently.
• Gabriel Arthur, was born in February 1877. Gabriel Arthur, known as Arthur to the family, became a scientist, married Dora Lewis, and had several children.
• Helen Maria, in November 1879, 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, Imogen Lucy, in 1904.
• Mary Elizabeth (twin to)
• Michael Ford, in April 1881. 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.

biography

From Encyclopedia Britannica

Even as a child, William Michael was in many ways a contrast to his more flamboyant brother—in his calm and rational outlook, financial prudence, and lack of egotism, for example. At 16 he became a clerk in the Excise (later Inland Revenue) Office at £80 a year and became a mainstay of the entire Rossetti family. His appointment as art critic to The Spectator magazine in 1850 and subsequent modest advancement in the civil service enabled him, in 1854, to establish his father, mother, and two sisters in a more comfortable home. In 1874 he married Emma Lucy, the daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown. William Michael retired from the Inland Revenue Office in 1894.

William Michael had literary interests almost as varied as those of his brother. He was a member of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and served as their diarist as well as the editor of their journal The Germ. He edited Christina’s (1904) and Dante Gabriel’s (1911) collected works and wrote D.G. Rossetti: A Memoir with Family Letters (1895). He dealt conscientiously with a vast amount of family correspondence and material relating to Pre-Raphaelism and his brother’s place in the movement, proving himself an indispensable chronicler in such publications as Preraphaelite Letters and Diaries (1900) and Ruskin, Rossetti, Preraphaelitism: Papers 1854–62 (1899).

William Michael was also an astute and independent-minded critic; he hailed Walt Whitman’s controversial Leaves of Grass (1855) as a work of genius and introduced that poet to British readers with a selection of his poems in 1868. He was also an early admirer of William Blake, producing an edition of his Poetical Works in 1874, and he published studies of Dante and other medieval poets, both Italian and English.

• "Dante Gabriel Rossetti; His Family-Letters, With A Memoir By William Michael Rossetti .. : Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1828-1882 : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive". 2017. Internet Archive. Accessed April 5 2017. https://archive.org/details/dantegabrielross01rossuoft
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Michael_Rossetti
• http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/courses/ennc986/class/bios/wmr.html
  • Reference: Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Apr 5 2017, 0:45:21 UTC
• Residence: 1881 - St Pancras, Middlesex, England
  • Reference: FamilySearch Family Tree - SmartCopy: Apr 5 2017, 0:52:03 UTC
• Reference: Ancestry Genealogy - SmartCopy: Apr 5 2017, 5:42:38 UTC
• Residence: London
  • Reference: Biographical Summaries of Notable People - SmartCopy: Apr 5 2017, 5:57:42 UTC