Alicia Craig Faxon | |
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Born | 1931 |
Education | BA Vassar College (1952) MA Radcliffe College (1953) PhD Boston University (1979) |
Known for | Author, art historian, professor, curator |
Notable work | Dante Gabriel Rossetti Self-Portraits by Women Painters Pre-Raphaelite Art in its European Context |
Spouse | Richard Bremmer Faxon |
Awards | Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award |
Alicia Craig Faxon is an American art historian, author, curator and educator. She is Professor Emerita at Simmons University, where she also served as Chair of the Department of Art and Music. Faxon also taught at Harvard University, the New England School of Art and the Massachusetts College of Art. She has curated several museum exhibitions, and served as acting director of the Danforth Museum in Framingham, Massachusetts. She authored several books on art history, as well as writing for the popular press, including The Boston Globe . Her archive and papers (c. 1969–2014) are held in the collection of Vassar University Special Collections Library. [1]
Faxon has authored several books including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Abbeville Press, that was reviewed in Publishers Weekly and Cosmopolitan. [2] [3] Other books include Self-Portraits by Women Painters (coauthored with Liana Cheney, and Kathleen Russo), published by Ashgate Press in 2000, and Pre-Raphaelite Art in its European Context, and Women and Jesus. [4] She contributed several entries to the Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography: Themes Depicted in Works of Art, including entries on Fatal Woman/Femme Fatale, Hair/Haircutting, Kiss/Kissing, Sacrifice, Martyrdom, Temptation, Metamorphosis and others. [5]
Faxon has received honors and awards for her work including the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996, and a publication in her honor, Breaking New Ground in Art History: A Festschrift in Honor of Alicia Craig Faxon, edited by Margaret A. Hanni. [6] [7]
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was an English poet, illustrator, painter, translator, and member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Rossetti inspired the next generation of artists and writers, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones in particular. His work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement.
Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English writer of romantic, devotional and children's poems, including "Goblin Market" and "Remember". She also wrote the words of two Christmas carols well known in Britain: "In the Bleak Midwinter", later set by Gustav Holst, Katherine Kennicott Davis, and Harold Darke, and "Love Came Down at Christmas", also set by Darke and other composers. She was a sister of the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and features in several of his paintings.
Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, better known as Elizabeth Siddal, was an English artist, art model, and poet. Siddal was perhaps the most significant of the female models who posed for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Their ideas of female beauty were fundamentally influenced and personified by her. Walter Deverell and William Holman Hunt painted Siddal, and she was the model for John Everett Millais's famous painting Ophelia (1852). Early in her relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Siddal became his muse and exclusive model, and he portrayed her in almost all his early artwork depicting women.
William Michael Rossetti was an English writer and critic.
Jane Morris was an English embroiderer in the Arts and Crafts movement and an artists' model who embodied the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of beauty. She was a model and muse to her husband William Morris and to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her sister was the embroiderer and teacher Elizabeth Burden.
Fanny Cornforth was an English artist's model, and the mistress and muse of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Cornforth performed the duties of housekeeper for Rossetti. In Rossetti's paintings, the figures modelled by Fanny Cornforth are generally rather voluptuous, differing from those of other models such as Alexa Wilding, Jane Morris and Elizabeth Siddal.
Marie Stillman was a British member of the second generation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Of the Pre-Raphaelites, she had one of the longest-running careers, spanning sixty years and producing over one hundred and fifty works, including Love's Messenger and numerous romantic scenes from the Divine Comedy. Though her work with the Brotherhood began as a favourite model, she soon trained and became a respected painter, earning praise from Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others.
Desperate Romantics is a six-part television drama serial about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, first broadcast on BBC Two between 21 July and 25 August 2009.
Louisa Ruth Herbert was a well-known Victorian-era English stage actress and model for the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Lady Lilith is an oil painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti first painted in 1866–1868 using his mistress Fanny Cornforth as the model, then altered in 1872–73 to show the face of Alexa Wilding. The subject is Lilith, who was, according to ancient Judaic myth, "the first wife of Adam" and is associated with the seduction of men and the murder of children. She is shown as a "powerful and evil temptress" and as "an iconic, Amazon-like female with long, flowing hair."
The Beloved is an oil painting on canvas by the English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), now in Tate Britain, London. Rossetti signed his initials and the date as "1865-6" on the bottom left of the canvas. It depicts the bride, or "beloved", from the Song of Solomon in the Hebrew Bible as she approaches her bridegroom, with her attendants.
Proserpine is an oil painting on canvas by English artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painted in 1874 and now in Tate Britain. Rossetti began work on the painting in 1871 and painted at least eight separate versions, the last only completed in 1882, the year of his death. Early versions were promised to Charles Augustus Howell. The painting discussed in this article is the so-called seventh version commissioned by Frederick Richards Leyland, now at the Tate Gallery, with the very similar final version now at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
Paolo and Francesca da Rimini is a watercolour by British artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painted in 1855 and now in Tate Britain.
Lucy Madox Brown Rossetti was a British artist, author, and model associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. She was married to the writer and art critic William Michael Rossetti.
The Day Dream or, as it was initially intended to be named, Monna Primavera, is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founder member Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The work, which measures 158.7 centimetres (62.5 in) high by 92.7 centimetres (36.5 in) wide, was undertaken in 1880 and depicts Jane Morris in a seated position on the bough of a sycamore tree. In her hand is a small stem of honeysuckle – a token of love in the Victorian era – that may be an indication of the secret affair the artist was immersed in with her at the time. The artwork was left to the Victoria and Albert Museum by Constantine Alexander Ionides in 1900.
A Sea-Spell is an oil painting of 1877 and an accompanying sonnet of 1869 by the English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, depicting a siren playing an instrument to lure sailors. It is now in the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Virginia Surtees was a British art historian and author.
Ligeia Siren is a chalk drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (DGR) that was completed in 1873. The painting depicts a siren, a creature from classic Greek mythology, that also appear in tales such as Homer's Odyssey or Virgil's Georgics. The drawing is predominantly inspired from Rossetti's own 1869 libretto The Doom of the Sirens with which Ligeia is one of the female leads. Instead of depicting the traditional encounter of the siren with her victims entranced by her beauty and powers of music, doomed to a terrible fate, as in The Siren (1900) by John William Waterhouse or Ulysses and the Sirens (1909) by Herbert James Draper. Rossetti depicts a timeless moment, where contrary to his depiction of her in his libretto, she appears tranquil and relatively innocuous to her intended victims in the background.
Venus Verticordia (1864–1868) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti is a semi-nude depiction of the goddess Venus, portrayed as a young woman with a golden halo and flowing auburn hair, surrounded by pink flowers in a dark, lush green garden. Her left breast is visible, while the right is obscured by the golden apple she holds in her left hand. In her right hand she holds an arrow, the point directed towards her own heart, and on which rests a small yellow butterfly. Other similar butterflies ring the halo surrounding her head, and another sits on top of the apple she holds.
Joan of Arc Kissing the Sword of Deliverance is a 1863 painting by the English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was bought for the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCS) at the Piccadilly Gallery in 1996, as the first Rossetti painting ever bought by a French museum. Its inventory number is 55.996.8.1.