Hanging the Mistletoe

Rossetti made this in 1860, the year of a long-delayed change in his own life. That May he finally married Elizabeth Siddal, the red-haired model he had drawn and painted for most of a decade and kept engaged through years of illness and hesitation. The woman reaching up to fix a sprig of mistletoe is most likely Siddal herself, though scholars have also floated Fanny Cornforth and, less plausibly, a later model. Mistletoe carried the familiar seasonal licence to kiss beneath it, a light domestic note from an artist better known for languid medieval heroines. Siddal's health never recovered, and she died early in 1862, less than two years after the wedding.