The Bower Meadow

This meadow was painted more than 20 years before the women who dance in it. Rossetti laid in the green background from nature near Sevenoaks in Kent back in 1850, when he was a young member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, then set the canvas aside. He returned to it in 1872 and added the four figures, their faces carrying the features of Jane Morris, the wife of his friend William Morris and the great, complicated love of his later life. By then Rossetti was a changed man, unwell and dependent on a sleeping drug called chloral, and he had suffered a breakdown that same year. The two women in front tune their instruments, caught in the moment just before the music, a mood he came back to again and again.