William Michael Rossetti
William Michael Rossetti (25 September 1829 – 5 February 1919) was an English writer and critic.
Biography
Born in London, he was a son of immigrant Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti and his wife Frances Rossetti née Polidori, and the brother of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti.
He was one of the seven founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, and became the movement's unofficial organizer and bibliographer. He edited the Brotherhood's literary magazine The Germ which published four issues in 1850 and wrote the poetry reviews for it.
It was William Michael Rossetti who recorded the aims of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at their founding meeting in September 1848:
To have genuine ideas to express;
To study nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;
To sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote;
