Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris

Who Dante Gabriel Rossetti was, as far as the record goes

The excerpts reviewed for this article give no birth or death dates for Rossetti and no biographical summary, so none is offered here. According to the Victoria and Albert Museum, he appears in the record as the maker behind a painting titled The Day Dream, as the person by whose posing arrangement an 1865 photograph of Jane Morris is titled, and as a named recipient of business letters. That is a narrow window, but it is a documented one.

Readers who want the fuller life story of the man at the centre of this circle will find it in the William Morris biography, which sets out the documented timeline for Morris himself and the people around him. This page stays with what the object records actually say about Rossetti.

Jane Morris posed by Rossetti: the 1865 photograph

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds an 1865 photograph titled Mrs William Morris posed by Rossetti, made by the photographer John R. Parsons. According to the V&A's record, it is an albumen print made from a wet collodion-on-glass negative, under museum number O182741. The record lists no place of production for the photograph, so none is suggested here.

The title itself carries the connection to Rossetti: the V&A names him in the posing of Jane Morris, the sitter. The photograph is therefore one of the clearest documented points of contact between Rossetti and the Morris household in the evidence reviewed for this page.

The survival of the prints has its own documented history. According to the V&A, Dr Robert Steele presented the original 19th century albumen prints to the museum in 1939, bound in an album covered in Morris fabric, and in 1942 he presented modern prints made from the original negatives. Those items then belonged to the granddaughter of William Michael Rossetti.

The Day Dream and the portrait miniature of Jane Morris

The second documented object is a portrait miniature of Jane Morris, Mrs William Morris. The V&A describes it as copied anonymously after the Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting The Day Dream, and dates it to around 1885 with England as its place of production, under museum number O1069620.

Two limits of the record matter here. The maker of the miniature is unknown, so the V&A's word anonymous is the honest description. And the miniature is a copy after Rossetti's painting, not a work he is recorded as painting himself. It documents the reach of his image of Jane Morris into the mid 1880s, two decades after the Parsons photograph.

Letters and memoranda: Rossetti in the Cockerell manuscript

The third documented object is a manuscript in the V&A holding letters and memoranda addressed to Philip Webb, William Morris and D.G. Rossetti, dated 1865 to 1949 and associated with Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, under museum number O1827771. According to the V&A, the manuscript includes letters and memoranda from Taylor, business manager of Morris & Co., written mainly to Philip Webb and also to William Morris and D.G. Rossetti, dated 1866 to 1869.

The contents reach beyond the firm's paperwork. The V&A records that the manuscript also contains one letter with sketch from Sir E. Burne-Jones and two letters from Rossetti addressed to Webb, along with other correspondence including some to Sydney Cockerell concerning Taylor, and photographs and annotations by Cockerell. Rossetti appears here as a correspondent within the same working circle as Webb and Morris, with Webb as the common recipient.

The V&A dates its acquisition of the Cockerell letters and memoranda to 02/03/1968. Webb's central place in the file is one reason a closer look at Philip Webb pairs naturally with this page, since the same manuscript documents his correspondence with Morris and Rossetti side by side.

What the sources disagree about, and what they leave out

The record of the Cockerell manuscript carries one notable range. As the Victoria and Albert Museum gives it, the title and production date cover 1865 to 1949. The excerpt for the physical description is also partially truncated, beginning with the word etters and memoranda, so its full wording cannot be quoted with confidence.

The gaps are just as important as the objects. The excerpts reviewed leave the following questions unanswered, and this page does not invent answers:

• No excerpt states when or how Rossetti first met William Morris, or the circumstances of any meeting.
• No excerpt records a work that Rossetti and Morris made together. The evidence records works connected to each of them, but none states a collaborative making.
• No excerpt gives Rossetti's birth or death dates, so none is printed here.
• No excerpt describes the nature of Rossetti's relationship to Morris beyond the shared recipients and correspondents named in the manuscript.

Where to see the documented objects

All three objects described on this page are Victoria and Albert Museum holdings: the 1865 Parsons photograph of Jane Morris posed by Rossetti, the portrait miniature copied after The Day Dream, and the Cockerell manuscript of letters and memoranda. Checking the V&A's own online records is the reliable way to confirm current display status, since object records do not guarantee that a work is on view at any given time.

For readers whose interest runs from the circle to the designs it produced, the store's related collection gathers the printed work in one place, described strictly by its own records.