Beata Beatrix

Rossetti finished this around 1870, working from years of drawings of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, who had died in 1862 of a laudanum overdose. On the surface it shows Beatrice, the woman the poet Dante loved, at the moment of her death, her eyes closed and her face lifted as if in a trance. But every viewer knew he was really painting his own loss. A red dove, the bird of love, drops a white poppy into her open hands, and the poppy is the flower laudanum is made from, a plain nod to how Siddal died. In the shadowed background Dante and the figure of Love look on. Rossetti said he did not want it read as the incident of a death, but as the subject seen through a sudden spiritual change.