William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919) always presented himself as the third Rossetti: a civil servant and critic unworthy to be compared with his brother, Dante Gabriel, and his sister, Christina. Not everyone has readily accepted Rossetti's evaluation of himself. The painter William Rothenstein remembered him as a man whose "outlook on life was broad and humane," and the only one of the Pre-Raphaelites "who was sympathetic towards the work of younger writers and painters."

More recently, Professor W. E. Fredeman has written of him as "among the P.R.B.s... almost the only man of...