Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882), generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter, and translator, and member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Rossetti was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. His work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement.
Theodore Watts-Dunton (12 October 1832 – 6 June 1914), from St Ives, Huntingdonshire, was an English poetry critic with major periodicals, and himself a poet. He is remembered particularly as the friend and minder of Algernon Charles Swinburne, whom he rescued from alcoholism and persuaded to continue writing.
Watts-Dunton had considerable influence as the friend of many of the leading men of letters of his time; he enjoyed the confidence of Tennyson and contributed an appreciation of him to the authorized biography. He was in later years Dante Gabriel Rossetti's most intimate friend (Rossetti made a portrait of Watts in pastel in 1874).
Kerrison Preston Esq. (1884-1974) practised as a solicitor in Bournemouth, Hampshire (now Dorset) from 1909 to 1949. He was a noted connoisseur with a collection including Pre-Raphaelite works by Rossetti and Burne-Jones, which were saved for the nation by Duke’s in 2007 and now form part of the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
