Le Messager de l'amour

Marie Spartali Stillman came into Pre-Raphaelite art first as a face, a Greek-British beauty who sat for Rossetti and others, and then she moved to the other side of the easel and became one of the very few women to paint seriously within that circle. She showed this at London's Grosvenor Gallery in 1885. A dove has just flown in through the open window carrying a folded love letter, and the young woman has set down her needlework to reach for it. Look at what she was stitching, a small blindfolded Cupid. She wears a red rose at her breast, and everything around her, the dove, the ivy, the rose, speaks the quiet code of love that a Victorian viewer knew how to read.