Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the context of "Philip Webb"

William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was an English textile designer, poet, artist, writer, and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts movement. He was a major contributor to the revival of traditional British textile arts and methods of production. His literary contributions helped to establish the modern fantasy genre, while he campaigned for socialism in fin de siècle Great Britain.

Morris was born in Walthamstow, Essex, to a wealthy middle-class family. He came under the strong influence of medievalism while studying classics at Oxford University, where he joined the Birmingham Set. After university, he married Jane Burden, and developed close friendships with Pre-Raphaelite artists and poets such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Edward Burne-Jones, as well as with Neo-Gothic architect Philip Webb. Webb and Morris designed Red House in Kent where Morris lived from 1859 to 1865, before moving to Bloomsbury, central London. In 1861, Morris founded the Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. decorative arts firm with Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Webb, and others, which became highly fashionable and much in demand. The firm profoundly influenced interior decoration throughout the Victorian period, with Morris designing tapestries, wallpaper, fabrics, furniture, and stained glass windows. In 1875, he assumed total control of the company, which was renamed Morris & Co.

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet, ARA (/bɜːrnˈdʒoʊnz/; 28 August 1833 – 17 June 1898) was an English painter and designer associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's style and subject matter.

Burne-Jones worked with William Morris as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co in the design of decorative arts. His early paintings show the influence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but by 1870 he had developed his own style. In 1877, he exhibited eight oil paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery, a new rival to the Royal Academy of Arts. These included The Beguiling of Merlin. The timing was right and he was taken up as a herald and star of the new Aesthetic Movement.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), later known as the Pre-Raphaelites, was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner who formed a seven-member "Brotherhood" partly modelled on the Nazarene movement. The Brotherhood was only ever a loose association and their principles were shared by other artists and poets of the time, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes and Marie Spartali Stillman. Later followers of the principles of the Brotherhood included Edward Burne-Jones and John William Waterhouse.

The group sought a return to the abundant detail, intense colours and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian art. They rejected what they regarded as the mechanistic approach first adopted by Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. The Brotherhood believed the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on the academic teaching of art, hence the name "Pre-Raphaelite". In particular, the group objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts, whom they called "Sir Sloshua". To the Pre-Raphaelites, according to William Michael Rossetti, "sloshy" meant "anything lax or scamped in the process of painting ... and hence ... any thing or person of a commonplace or conventional kind". The group associated their work with John Ruskin, an English critic whose influences were driven by his religious background. Christian themes were abundant.

Marie Stillman (née Spartali) (Greek: Μαρία Σπαρτάλη; 10 March 1844 – 6 March 1927) was a British painter, of Greek descent. A member of the second generation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, she is regarded as the greatest female artist of that movement.

Of the Pre-Raphaelites, she had one of the longest-running careers, spanning sixty years and producing over one hundred and fifty works, including Love's Messenger and numerous romantic scenes from the Divine Comedy. Though her work with the Brotherhood began as a favourite model, she soon trained and became a respected painter, earning praise from Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others.

A doppelgänger (/ˈdɒpəlɡɛŋər, -ɡæŋ-/ DOP-əl-gheng-ər, -⁠gang-, also doppelgaenger and doppelganger) is a supernatural double of a living person, especially one who haunts the doubled person.

In fiction and mythology and in common parlance, the doppelgänger either is a ghost or a paranormal phenomenon, usually perceived as the harbinger of bad luck. A literary example of the doppelgänger is the evil twin of the protagonist. In modern times, the term twin stranger is occasionally used.

Algernon Charles Swinburne (5 April 1837 – 10 April 1909) was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He was a major contributor to the Pre-Raphaelite movement in poetry, along with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris. His greatest works are the verse drama Atalanta in Calydon (1865), written in the form of an Ancient Greek tragedy, and his Pre-Raphaelite Poems and Ballads (1866).

In his poetry, Swinburne rebelled against the Christian morality of the Victorian era, drawing from classical, medieval, and Renaissance sources to explore atheism in "Hymn to Proserpine," suicide in "The Triumph of Time," lesbian desire in "Anactoria," and sadomasochism in "Dolores." While Swinburne's work attracted considerable scandal, it had prominent Victorian defenders, including John Ruskin.

Jane Morris (née Burden; 19 October 1839 – 26 January 1914) was an English embroiderer in the Arts and Crafts movement and an artists' model who embodied the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of beauty. She was a model and muse to her husband William Morris and to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her sister was the embroiderer and teacher Elizabeth Burden.