Frederick Sandys

Frederick Sandys spent years in the orbit of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the founder-poet of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and for a while the two shared a house in Chelsea. The friendship ended badly around 1866, when Rossetti accused him of copying his pictures, and Sandys has been read ever since partly in that shadow.

His own best-known work answers for him. Medea, painted between 1866 and 1868, shows the sorceress of Greek myth at the moment she mixes the poison to destroy her rival, coral beads slipping through her fingers before a gilded Japanese screen. The Royal Academy rejected it in 1868. Shown there the next year instead, it drew warm praise in The Times, and it remains the picture his name rests on.

A Norwich man, first taught by his father, Sandys worked slowly and finished little. Through his later decades he turned mostly to portrait heads in colored chalk, exact down to the last curl and jewel.