Jeanne d'Arc embrassant l'épée de la délivrance

A French national heroine, painted by an Englishman, and it took France until 1996 to buy one. Rossetti made this in 1863, the year after his wife Elizabeth Siddal died, when he turned to painting single women seen up close, half-devotional and half-sensual. Joan presses her lips to the hilt of her sword as though the blade were a crucifix, armoured but soft-featured, the model probably a German woman he knew. Rossetti cared less about the historical Joan than about the charged meeting of a woman and an object of faith. When a Strasbourg museum finally acquired the picture in 1996, it was the first Rossetti to enter a French public collection, and it now hangs on loan in that city's fine-arts museum.