The Damsel of the Sanct Grael

The grail maiden is barely a character in Thomas Malory's medieval Morte d'Arthur. She appears in a few lines, young and dressed all in white, carrying the holy cup. Rossetti took that sliver and built her a face. He first drew her in the 1850s and returned to her in 1874 in this oil, painted for the Liverpool collector George Rae. The model was Alexa Wilding, one of the calm, full-lipped women who sit for much of his late work. He crowds the picture with meaning you can read off the surface, a dove of the Holy Spirit hovering at her head, vines and grapes worked into her robe for the wine of the sacrament. The face she wears here became, for later readers of the Arthur stories, the way the grail-bearer was pictured.