Lady Lilith

The Lady Lilith at the Metropolitan Museum is a watercolour-and-gouache version that Rossetti and his assistant Henry Treffry Dunn made in 1867, after Rossetti's larger oil of the year before. Lilith comes from old Jewish legend as a first wife of Adam, and Rossetti paints her as a self-absorbed beauty combing out a great fall of hair before a mirror, roses and poppies around her. The face here is that of Fanny Cornforth, Rossetti's model and mistress. In the oil version he later painted over her features with those of another model, Alexa Wilding, but this replica keeps Cornforth. Rossetti wrote a sonnet on the theme of the body's beauty to go with the picture.