Mary in the House of St. John

After the crucifixion, tradition holds that the apostle John took Mary, the mother of Jesus, into his own home and cared for her there. Rossetti painted that quiet aftermath in the late 1850s, in the glowing, hand-sized watercolour manner he and his Pre-Raphaelite friends loved. There is little drama in it. Mary is older now, alone in a plain room, tending a small flame in the dusk, the events of the Gospel already behind her. It is a private, domestic kind of holiness, closer to a medieval book of hours than to a grand altarpiece. The sheet crossed the Atlantic long ago and belongs today to the Delaware Art Museum, home to one of the largest Pre-Raphaelite collections outside Britain.