Mariana

Millais painted this in 1851, when he was barely 21 and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a small group of young British painters bent on reviving the sharp colour and fine detail of art before Raphael. The woman is Mariana, a character Shakespeare invented and Tennyson took up in an 1830 poem. She was jilted after her dowry sank with a ship, and left to wait, year after year, in a moated grange for a man who never comes. When the picture was first shown, Millais printed Tennyson's lines beside it, ending, "I would that I were dead." He gives you the boredom of that waiting in her body, the arch of her back as she straightens up from her embroidery and presses her hands to her spine. Autumn leaves have blown across the floor, marking the passing of yet another season. Behind her the stained glass shows the Annunciation, the angel bringing Mary joyful news, set deliberately against Mariana's own emptiness. Millais copied that window from a real one at Merton College, Oxford. The painting is in Tate Britain in London.