Rossetti’s muse was a better painter than he was: The Rossettis, at Tate Britain, reviewed

‘A queer fellow’ is how John Everett Millais described Dante Gabriel Rossetti after his death, ‘so dogmatic and so irritable when opposed.’ What’s queer in England is quite normal in Italy, where heated arguments are described as ‘discussioni’, but history has tended to forget that Rossetti was Italian. His fellow Pre-Raphaelites, however, were very conscious of his foreignness, though Holman Hunt found the ‘maccaroni’ served at the Rossetti family table – where you were as likely to meet Giuseppe Mazzini as Niccolo Paganini – ‘delicious’.

Gabriel (he adopted the Dante in his teens) was the second of four children born in quick succession to Gabriele Rossetti, the Italian poet and exiled founder of the revolutionary network the Carbonari, and to Frances Polidori, daughter of another émigré writer, whom he married in London in 1826 after fleeing Naples. The Rossetti household was literary, socialist and unconventional. All the children drew and wrote – thanks to grandpa Polidori’s private printing press, Gabriel and his younger sister Christina were both published authors in their teens – but only Gabriel thought of pursuing art as a career. At the Royal Academy, bored by the formal teaching, he continued to dither over whether to become a poet or a painter until he discovered William Blake and decided to be both.

Tate Britain’s new exhibition is unusual in being about a family rather than a movement, and – with Christina Rossetti’s poems papering the walls around her brother’s ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation)’ (1849-50) in the opening room – as much about literary as visual imagery. The Rossetti children’s literary bent was a formative influence on the Pre-Raphaelites – Gabriel, his younger brother William and Christina wrote half the content of the group’s short-lived magazine The Germ – and their revolutionary spirit rubbed off on the Brotherhood, lending it the cachet of a secret society.