William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919) was an English writer and critic.

Born in London, he was the youngest child of immigrant Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti, and the brother of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti.

He was one of the seven founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, and became the movement's unofficial organizer and bibliographer. He edited the PRB's literary magazine The Germ which published four issues in 1850 and wrote the poetry reviews for it.

It was William Michael Rossetti who recorded the aims of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at their founding meeting in September 1848:

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.

Although Rossetti worked full time as a civil servant, he maintained a prolific output of criticism and biography across a range of interests from Algernon Swinburne to James McNeill Whistler. He wrote a study of his maternal uncle John William Polidori (physician to Lord Byron), a comprehensive biography of D. G. Rossetti, and edited the collected works of D. G. Rossetti and Christina Rossetti.

In 1874 he married Lucy Madox Brown, daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown.

Further information

• Angela Thirlwell. 'William and Lucy: The Other Rossettis'. Yale; ISBN 0300102003

• Julie L'Enfant. 'William Rossetti's Art Criticism: The Search for Truth in Victorian Art'. University Press of America; ISBN 0761812903