El cenador azul

This is less a portrait than a bouquet arranged around a woman. The model is Fanny Cornforth, Rossetti's mistress and housekeeper, and almost everything in the picture points back to her. The blue cornflowers in the foreground, and the flowered tiles behind, play on the flower's old name, and the passion flowers hint at her warmth. Rossetti gives her a Japanese koto to pluck and sets her against the blue-and-white porcelain patterns he loved to collect. There is no saint here and no story, only colour, music and a beautiful face, which in 1865 was itself the daring idea, that a painting need only be beautiful. He made it for a Manchester dealer, and it now hangs in Birmingham.