Maria Zambaco

In 1870 Maria Zambaco was the woman half the Pre-Raphaelite circle was in love with. Greek by family, wealthy, and a gifted sculptor in her own right, she had modelled for the painter Edward Burne-Jones, whose affair with her, and he was married, had blown up the year before into a public scandal, complete with a threatened drowning in a London canal. Rossetti drew her here in coloured chalks, wrapped in a loose robe like an ancient Greek chlamys, her pale skin glowing through it. He gives her no setting and no story, just the face and the fall of the cloth, the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of the beautiful, unattainable woman. The same year Burne-Jones painted his own portrait of her, and hers is the face that runs through much of his later work.