Johanna von Orléans

Rossetti painted this in the early months of 1882, at a friend's house on the Kent coast at Birchington-on-Sea, where he had gone to try to recover his health. He was 53 and failing, worn down by years of chloral and insomnia, and he finished this Joan within a few days of his death on the 9th of April. The model for the saint's face was Jane Morris, wife of his friend William Morris, whom he had been painting for two decades. He took the subject from a small watercolour he had made almost 20 years earlier, when he was young and well. Joan lifts her sword to her lips, kissing the blade before battle.