Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Washing Hands, 1865

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator, and was the brother of poet Christina Rossetti and critic William Michael Rossetti. For many years, Rossetti worked on English translations of Italian poetry, he later created a method of painting in watercolours, using thick pigments mixed with gum to give rich effects similar to medieval illuminations. He also developed a novel drawing technique in pen-and-ink.

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, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Rossetti's art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism, and in 1850, he met Elizabeth Siddal, an important model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Over the next decade she became his muse, his pupil, and his passion, they married in 1860. Rossetti's personal life was closely linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models, including Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris.

Washing Hands was one of three watercolours that Rossetti painted in the summer of 1865 for Frederick Craven, a Manchester calico-printer. Craven was a new patron who would eventually own five works by Rossetti in this medium. It represents a return to his earlier watercolour technique, narrative subject and psychological intensity. Even its eighteenth-century setting, though rare for Rossetti, looks back to his earlier work of the 1850's.

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HC-1515: card size 7" x 5" (178mm x 127mm)