Hist, Said Kate the Queen

In 1851 Robert Browning was still a poet few people read, far less famous than his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The young Pre-Raphaelites admired him, Rossetti in particular, and this small oil takes its title from a song in Browning's verse drama Pippa Passes. The drama is set in Asolo, the hill town where Caterina Cornaro, once Queen of Cyprus, had kept her court. In the song a page, in love with the queen and far beneath her, sings somewhere out of sight. The queen hushes her women with a "Hist!", and a maid who is binding up hair answers that it is only a page, singing unseen as he crumbles food for the hounds. Rossetti first tried the subject on a large canvas and gave it up. This picture, only about 60 centimetres wide, keeps the composition of that abandoned canvas.