Rebelling against English academic painting's soft forms and what appeared to be a lax morality, the Brotherhood aspired to a crisp, emotional style embracing the purity and simplicity of Italian art before Raphael. Using minute detail and elaborate symbolism, they painted from nature. Rossetti expanded the group's aims by linking poetry, painting, and social idealism and by interpreting the term Pre-Raphaelite as synonymous with a romanticized medieval past. In the second phase of the movement in the mid-1850s, Rossetti gained a powerful but exacting patron in the art critic John Ruskin.

The Brotherhood's early doctrines were expressed in four declarations: 1. To have genuine ideas to express; 2. To study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them; 3. 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; 4. And most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.

These principles are deliberately undogmatic, since the PRB wished to emphasise the personal responsibility of individual artists to determine their own ideas and method of depiction. Influenced by Romanticism, they thought that freedom and responsibility were inseparable. Nevertheless, they were particularly fascinated by Medieval culture, believing it to possess a spiritual and creative integrity lost in later eras. This emphasis on Medieval culture was to clash with the realism promoted by the stress on independent observation of nature. In its early stages the PRB believed that the two interests were consistent with one another, but in later years the movement divided in two directions. The realist side was led by Hunt and Millais, while the medievalist side was led by Rossetti and his followers, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. This split was never absolute, since both factions believed that art was essentally spiritual in character, opposing their idealism to the materialist realism associated with Courbet and Impressionism.

In their attempts to revive the brilliance of colour found in quattrocento art, Hunt and Millais developed a technique of painting in thin glazes of pigment over a wet white ground. In this way they hoped that their colours would retain jewel-like transparency and clarity. This emphasis of brilliance of colour was in reaction to the excessive use of bitumen by earlier British artists such as Reynolds, David Wilkie and Benjamin Robert Haydon. Bitumen produces unstable areas of muddy darkness, an effect which the Pre-Raphaelies despised.

Romantic love was Rossetti's main theme in both poetry and painting. Elizabeth Siddal, whom he married in 1860, was the subject of many fine drawings, and his memory of her after she died (1862) is implicit in the Beata Beatrix (1863; Tate Gallery, London). Toward the end of his life, Rossetti sank into a morbid state, possibly induced by his disinterment (1869) of the manuscript poems he had buried with his wife and by savage critical attacks on his poetry. He spent his last years as an invalid recluse.

Rossetti's struggle to accept the tenants of his religious upbringing left a space in his life that he filled with his art. He turned to the Fair Lady -- whether as Blessed Damozel, femme fatale, or victim -- as a source of salvation. His heaven was a heaven of earthly pleasure. His God smiled approvingly on the lovers' embrace. The creation of art was an act of devotion and the appreciation of female beauty a form of prayer. Rossetti's devotion to female beauty in his work reflects a similar obsession in his personal life. In his poetry and painting, Rossetti used the theme of feminine beauty to explore his own fantasies and conceptions of heaven, salvation, and the dichotomy between earthly and spiritual love.

According to David Sonstroem, who wrote Rossetti and the Fair Lady, 95% of his poems and 98% of his paintings were in some way about feminine beauty. Some of Rossetti's paintings were portraits, but most were allegorical, mythical, literary, or historical figures with some conceptual significance beyond the readily apparent physical representation. Many of Rossetti's works relate to text, either having been inspired by other poets or stories, or by inspiring poetry from the image itself. Rossetti's Fair Lady paintings repeatedly used the same models that Rossetti chose because they represented his idea of ideal beauty. The Rossetti type, though not universal in all his work, distinguishes Rossetti from his Pre-Raphaelite brothers, W. H. Hunt and J. E. Millais. Rossetti's Fair Lady has long, lustrous hair and an elegant, though sturdy and elongated neck. She has heavy eyelids and a pouting mouth that speak of sensousness and soulfulness simultaneously. Her pale, luminous skin illuminates Rossetti's canvases with a glow that seems to come from within. Though Rossetti used many models during his career, his type remained relatively consistent.

Siddal, whose name was originally spelt 'Siddall' (it was Rossetti who dropped the second 'l') was first noticed by Deverell, while she was working as a milliner. Neither she nor her family had any artistic aspirations or interests. She was employed as a model by Deverell and through him was introduced to the Pre-Raphaelites. The nineteen year old with her tall thin frame and copper hair was the first of the Pre-Raphaelite stunners.

While posing for Millais' Ophelia (1852), Siddal had floated in a bathtub full of water to model the drowned Ophelia. painted daily into the winter with Siddal modeling. He put lamps under the tub to warm the water. On one occasion the lamps went out and the water slowly became icy cold. Millais was absorbed by his painting and did not notice. Siddal did not complain. After this session she became very sick, and never fully recovered. It was long thought that she suffered from tuberculosis, historians now believe that an intestinal disorder was more likely. Whatever the case Siddal never fully recovered and suffered from poor health from then on.

Elizabeth Siddal was the primary muse for Dante Gabriel Rossetti throughout most of his youth. After he met her he began to paint her and almost only her and stopped her from modelling for the other Pre-Raphaelites. These drawings and paintings culminated in Beata Beatrix, painted in 1863, one year after Elizabeth's death. She was used as a model for this painting which shows a praying Beatrice (from Dante Alighieri).Rossetti painted and repainted her and drew countless sketches of her. His depictions show a beauty.

As Siddal came from a lower class family Rossetti feared introducing her to his parents. Lizzy was also the victim of harsh criticism from Rossetti's sisters. The knowledge that the family would not approve the wedding contributed to Rosetti putting it off. Siddal also appears to have believed with some justification that Rossetti was always seeking to replace her with a younger muse which contributed to her later depressive periods and illness.

Siddal travelled to Paris and Nice for several years for her health. She returned to England in 1860 to marry Rossetti. In the previous ten years he had been engaged to her and then broken it off at the last minute several times. Stress from those incidents had affected her. She was now clinically depressed and her long illness had given her access to and addiction to laudanum. In 1861, Siddal became pregnant. She was overjoyed about this, but the pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. Siddal overdosed on laudanum shortly after becoming pregnant for a second time. Rossetti discovered the body and a suicide note. Consumed with grief and guilt Rossetti went to the see Holman Hunt who instructed him to burn the note - under the law at the time suicide was both illegal and immoral and would have brought a scandal on the family as well as barred Siddal from a christian burial.

Death, however, was not her last adventure. Overcome with grief, Rossetti enclosed in Elizabeth's coffin a small journal containing the only copies he had of his many poems. He slid the book into Elizabeth's flowing red hair. In 1869, Rossetti was chronically addicted to drugs and alcohol. He convinced himself that he was going blind and couldn't paint. He began to write poetry again. Before publishing his newer poems he became obsessed with retrieving the poems he had slipped into Elizabeth's hair. Rossetti procured an order to have her coffin exhumed to retrieve the manuscript. This was done in the dead of night so as to avoid public curiosity and attention, and Rossetti was not present. Her corpse was reportedly remarkably preserved and her delicate beauty intact when the manuscript was retrieved. Despite this report a worm had burrowed through the book so that it was difficult to read some of the poems.

Rossetti published the old poems with his newer ones; they were not well received by some critics because of their eroticism, and he was haunted by the exhumation through the rest of his life.

Rossetti's relationship with Siddal is also explored by Christina Rossetti in her poem "In an Artist's Studio".