Mariana

The woman is Jane Morris, wife of Rossetti's friend William Morris, and by 1870 she and Rossetti had grown close while her marriage strained, which gives this picture an edge its literary subject only half explains. She sits as Mariana, the jilted woman of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, abandoned by her fiance and left to wait. Rossetti chooses the moment when a boy sings to her, and she turns from her needlework with the heavy, unsatisfied look he gave Jane again and again. The rich fabrics and crowded surface are typical of his later manner, closer to decoration than to storytelling. He finished it in 1870. It hangs now in the art gallery at Aberdeen, in Scotland.