Un canto di Natale

The title promises a religious scene, and there is almost none in it. Rossetti painted this in 1867 as a picture of a single young woman in gold and purple, plucking a small lyre slung at her neck and singing. The carol is really an excuse for colour, music and rich cloth. By this date he had given up storytelling pictures for exactly this kind of image: a beautiful figure made to be looked at rather than read, the direction English art was drifting as the century's middle passed. He had used the same title once before, ten years earlier, for a small watercolour, so this glowing oil panel is his second try at it. The singer is Ellen Smith, a Nottingham woman he had found not long before, and this was among the last pictures he made from her.