The story
Jane Morris, wife of the designer William Morris, was the model for Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Pia de' Tolomei, a picture the English painter began in 1868 and went on working at for years. The subject comes from Dante's Purgatorio, a noblewoman of Siena shut away by her husband in a castle in the Maremma marshes, and it is one of the best-known paintings at the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas.
The museum belongs to the University of Kansas, and it grew out of one gift. In 1917 Sallie Casey Thayer, a Kansas City collector, gave the university more than 7,000 objects, from paintings and prints to textiles, ceramics and furniture, to encourage the study of fine arts in the Middle West. For decades they were shown in Spooner Hall on the campus. In 1978 another Kansas City collector, Helen Foresman Spencer, paid for a new Neoclassical building in Indiana limestone, designed by the architect and former student Robert E. Jenks, and the museum took her name.
Today the collection runs to roughly 47,000 objects across European, American and Asian art. Among the European paintings are a portrait of a little girl in an armchair by the French painter Édouard Manet and a sea at sunset by Gustave Courbet, painted in 1869.
