Rossetti and His Circle – Max Beerbohm (1922)

The portfolio features caricatures of the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti alongside figures from the Pre-Raphaelite movement, including Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Beerbohm also depicts members of Rossetti's broader social and artistic circle in Victorian London.

Max Beerbohm was an English essayist, parodist, and caricaturist renowned for his witty visual and literary portraits of cultural figures. He published Rossetti and His Circle in 1922, decades after the height of the Pre-Raphaelite movement he was satirizing.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English artists founded in 1848 who rejected academic painting conventions in favor of detailed, colorful works inspired by art before the Renaissance. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a founding member, and Beerbohm's drawings lampoon the second generation of the movement and its bohemian social scene.

Beerbohm's caricatures use clean, economical linework with gentle satirical exaggeration, poking fun at the aesthetic postures and romantic entanglements of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. The drawings are accompanied by brief written commentaries that contextualize the relationships and personalities being parodied.