Béatrice

All his life Rossetti circled one figure: Beatrice, the woman Dante loved and mourned in medieval Florence. After his own wife and model, Elizabeth Siddal, died in 1862 from an overdose, the two women fused in his mind, and Beatrice became a way of painting Siddal again and again. By 1879, when this was made, Rossetti was a heavy, ailing recluse, dependent on the sedative chloral and rarely leaving his house in Chelsea. He was still returning to the same face, half Florence and half his lost wife, dark-haired and heavy-lidded, tilted up toward a light she does not seem to see.