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.