| Timeline |
| 1828 |
Born 12 May in London |
| 1830 |
Sister Christina born |
| 1837 |
Attends King's College School until 1842 |
| 1841 |
Begins his training in Sass’s Drawing School |
| 1846 |
Accepted into the Royal Academy |
| 1847 |
The Blessed Damozel published |
| 1847 |
Leaves Academy to study art under Ford Madox Brown |
| 1848 |
Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais begin to call themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood |
| 1849 |
Exhibits first important painting The Girlhood of Mary Virgin |
| 1857 |
Commissioned to decorate the Oxford Union Building |
| 1860 |
Marries Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal |
| 1861 |
The Early Italian Poets published |
| 1862 |
Elizabeth Siddal dies from a self-administered overdose of morphia, Rossetti places a manuscript containing all his unpublished poems in her coffin |
| 1869 |
Disinters the manuscript poems he had buried with his wife |
| 1870 |
Poems published |
| 1871 |
Critically attacked in an infamous pamphlet entitled The Fleshy School of Poetry |
| 1871 |
Rossetti and William Morris lease Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, Rossetti falls in love with Morris' wife, Jane |
| 1872 |
Suffers a mental breakdown |
| 1872 |
The Stealthy School of Criticism, Rossetti's reply to The Fleshy School of Poetry is printed in The Athenaeum |
| 1881 |
The King’s Tragedy and Ballads and Sonnets with The House of Life published |
| 1882 |
Dies of kidney failure 9 April |
