My Lady Greensleeves

At the end of the 1850s Rossetti gave up the crowded medieval scenes he had painted as a young Pre-Raphaelite and began doing something quieter and more provocative: a single woman, seen close and half-length, filling the whole panel. My Lady Greensleeves comes out of that turn. The title borrows an old Tudor song about a lady who has thrown her lover over, and Rossetti gives her the heavy features and red-gold hair he returned to again and again in these years. The woman who sat for it was the wife of his own studio assistant, Walter Knewstub. There is no scene and no moral. Just a face, a spill of hair, and the green sleeves that gave both the song and the picture their name.