1828 - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, born on the 12th of May in London, England. Original name  Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti  English painter and poet who helped found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters treating religious, moral, and medieval subjects in a nonacademic manner. He was the most illustrious member of the Rossetti family.



1836 - 1841 - After a general education in the junior department of King's College, he hesitated between poetry and painting as a vocation.



1842 - When about 14 he went to “Sass's,” an old-fashioned drawing school in Bloomsbury (central London).



1845 - He went to the Royal Academy schools, where he became a full student.

 

1849 - 1850 - His first two oil paintings—“The Girlhood of Mary”; Tate Gallery, London) and “Ecce Ancilla Domini” (“The Annunciation”; Tate Gallery)—were simple in style, they were elaborate in symbolism.



1850 - In the rich word-painting and emotional force of his poem “The Blessed Damozel,” published in the first issue of The Germ, the Pre-Raphaelite magazine.



1851 - 1860 - A typical example of his work from this period is “How They Met Themselves” (Fritzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). 



1856 - He was led by Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur and Tennyson's Idylls of the King to evoke in his paintings an imaginary Arthurian epoch, with heraldic glow and pattern of colour and medieval accessories of armour and dress.

  

       - He came into contact with the then-Oxford undergraduates Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. With these two young disciples he initiated a second phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.



1856 - 1857 - A new era of book decoration was foreshadowed by his illustration for the Moxon edition of the Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. His commission to paint a triptych (“The Seed of David”) for Llandaff Cathedral was a prelude to the ambitious scheme to decorate the Oxford Union debating chamber with mural paintings of Arthurian themes.



1860 - Elizabeth Siddal, who served at first as model for the whole group but was soon attached to Rossetti alone and, married him. Many portrait drawings testify to his affection for her.



1882 - Died on the 9th of April in Birchington-on-Sea, Kent.

 

http://www.s9.com/Biography/Rossetti-Dante-Gabriel