Before the Battle

Rossetti described this sheet himself in a letter of 1858 to Charles Eliot Norton, a young scholar from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a friend of the critic John Ruskin. It shows, he wrote, a castle full of ladies who have been embroidering banners, which the lady of the castle is now fastening to the spears, and he hoped that in colour it was one of the best things he had done. He asked 50 guineas, and Norton agreed. Then the watercolour stayed in London for almost four years. The delay may have had to do with Ruskin, who at first thought little of it. Only in January 1862 did Ruskin write to Norton that he liked it now that Rossetti had reworked it, and it was sent across the Atlantic that year. The date on the sheet is 1858, though Rossetti's brother William recalled it being painted the year before. Norton later taught the history of art at Harvard, and the picture stayed in his family until the Museum of Fine Arts bought it from his daughter Sara in 1912.