Dante Gabriel Rossetti: self - portrait

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Date: 1861 

Materials: Pencil

This self-portrait shows Rossetti dressed in his painting coat. Contemporary descriptions of the artist concentrate on his dark grey eyes and large, round forehead. Henry Treffry Dunn, his studio assistant from 1867 to 1881, wrote that "his face conveyed to me the existence of underlying currents of strong passions impregnated with melancholy", while his last companion Hall Caine "thought his head and face singularly noble, and from the eyes upward full of beauty".