Painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti is famous for his provocative and mesmerizingly beautiful images of women. In haunting paintings such as his Beata Beatrix, The Day Dream, and Monna Vanna, Rossetti created a type of languid beauty that has cast a timeless spell of enchantment over viewers. It is this contribution to art history for which Rossetti is today chiefly remembered and admired.

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti was born in London, England, in 1828. As a young man, he briefly studied art with the painter Ford Madox Brown. During the same year (1848), the charismatic Rossetti was to meet fellow artists William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. This group of friends and colleagues - Rossetti, Hunt, and Millais - would together form the core of the innovative Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (the PRB). The program devised by the members of this group was to have a profound effect on Rossetti's early artistic development, the results of which can be seen in such works as The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and The Annunciation. In time, the painter broke away from the strict demands of the PRB and developed his own unique style. Ultimately, Rossetti's mature works focused on the depiction of stunning images of women.