The Loving Cup

Rossetti painted this in 1867 for Frederick Leyland, a Liverpool shipping magnate who was becoming one of his steadiest buyers. The model was Alexa Wilding, a young woman he had noticed in the street and who sat for many of his richly dressed single figures in these years. She lifts a golden loving cup, the two-handled vessel passed round and shared at feasts and weddings, wrapped in the heavy medieval costume Rossetti liked to build his pictures around. Then the painting vanished. It was thought destroyed in the Second World War and written off for decades, until it turned up safe in the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, which is where you can stand in front of it today.