Regina Cordium

Rossetti married Elizabeth Siddal in May 1860, after roughly a decade of long courtship and her chronic ill health. Within months he painted her like this and titled it Regina Cordium, Latin for queen of hearts, building the picture to resemble the playing card itself, a cropped head against flat gold, a small Cupid on a scroll below, red beads at her throat. Siddal had modelled for the Pre-Raphaelite circle for years, most famously as the drowned Ophelia for Millais. This is Rossetti looking at her as his own wife. She would die less than two years later, in 1862, from an overdose of laudanum.