St Catherine

Rossetti painted this in 1857, the year he gathered a group of younger admirers to decorate the Oxford Union with murals. John Ruskin, his great supporter, commissioned the little panel and then let it go. The saint is Catherine of Alexandria, holding the spiked wheel of her legend, but the real subject is the act of painting itself. She is not a vision here. She is a model, posing in a medieval studio for an artist we glimpse at his easel on the left. The woman who sat for Catherine was Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti's model and soon his wife, whose face he painted over and over through these years.