Rossetti’s muse was a better painter than he was: The Rossettis, at Tate Britain, reviewed

‘A queer fellow’ is how John Everett Millais described Dante Gabriel Rossetti after his death, ‘so dogmatic and so irritable when opposed.’ What’s queer in England is quite normal in Italy, where heated arguments are described as ‘discussioni’, but history has tended to forget that Rossetti was Italian. His fellow Pre-Raphaelites, however, were very conscious of his foreignness, though Holman Hunt found the ‘maccaroni’ served at the Rossetti family table – where you were as likely to meet Giuseppe Mazzini as Niccolo Paganini – ‘delicious’.

Gabriel (he adopted the Dante in his teens) was the second of four children born in quick succession to Gabriele Rossetti, the Italian poet and exiled founder of the revolutionary network the Carbonari, and to Frances Polidori, daughter of another émigré writer, whom he married in London in 1826 after fleeing Naples.