Belcolore

Belcolore is a character from Boccaccio's Decameron, a handsome married village woman who catches the eye of the local priest. Rossetti painted her in 1863 as a girl in a round frame lifting a rosebud to her lips, amber hair loose, cheeks flushed. He had opened this vein a few years earlier with a picture called Bocca Baciata, trading the crowded medieval scenes of his youth for single sensual women filling the whole panel. The model here is thought to be Fanny Cornforth, who kept house for him and sat for many of these heads. He finished it the year after his wife Elizabeth Siddal had died of an overdose of laudanum, a stretch when he leaned hard on Cornforth's company. He sold Belcolore that same July to the painter and collector George Price Boyce.