A Sea-Spell

Rossetti finished this in 1877, a sea-siren bent over her strings, luring sailors with a music we are left to imagine. The model was Alexa Wilding, one of the faces he painted over and over in his last years. The instrument is the surprise: what looks at first like a lute is really a Japanese koto, a long 13-stringed zither, and its presence catches the craze for Japanese things then sweeping London studios and drawing rooms. Rossetti wrote a sonnet to hang beside the painting, as he liked to do. Its opening line sets a lute shadowed in an apple tree, though the instrument he actually placed in her hands is that far-eastern koto.