Marie Spartali Stillman

In 1864 the painter Whistler introduced a young Greek-British woman to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the leading Pre-Raphaelite, and she began sitting for him as a model. When Marie Spartali said she wanted to paint rather than only be painted, Rossetti sent her to train with Ford Madox Brown, another Pre-Raphaelite, who later called her the most intellectual of his models.

The daughter of a wealthy Greek merchant and consul in London, she had the education and the connections to settle for being a society beauty. Instead she built a working career that ran for decades, producing well over a hundred watercolours of subjects drawn from Dante, Boccaccio and medieval romance.

In 1871 she married the American journalist William Stillman against her father's wishes, and much of her later life was spent in Italy, where the Tuscan landscape began appearing behind her figures. She kept exhibiting into old age, still painting the literary heroines she had started with in Brown's studio.