Rossetti and His Circle

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's house in Chelsea was a bohemian enclave in Victorian London, the social centre for such rebels as the visionary painter Edward Burne-Jones, the socialist William Morris, the aesthete James McNeil Whistler and the poet Charles Swinburne. The rumours it aroused mixed fact and fiction to tell of love affairs between artists and models, of noctural rambles and drunken poetry recitations, of the house's collection of Oriental china, medieval musical instruments and exotic animals. But fact of fantasy, the circle's bohemian image was inseparable from their artistic experiments.;This text offers perspectives on the sensual depictions of women, the use of intense colour and exotic accessories to heighten sensory experience, the overtones of spirituality, mysticism and the occult in the art of Rossetti and his circle. Through their paintings, Rossetti and his friends transformed bohemian life into a religion of beauty, leading the way toward the Symbolist art of the late 19th century.