Isabella and the Pot of Basil

The subject comes from a poem by Keats, taken in turn from a medieval Italian tale. A young woman's brothers murder the man she loves and bury him in secret. She finds the body, cuts off the head, and hides it in a large pot of basil, which she then tends and weeps over day and night. Hunt shows her wrapped around that pot in a thin nightgown, unable to sleep. There is a private grief underneath it too. He began the painting in Florence in 1866, just after his young wife Fanny died there, and he used his memory of her for Isabella's face. He worked on it steadily through his mourning and finished it back in England early in 1868.