Ritrovata

In the 1850s the fallen woman was everywhere in British art and writing, and reformers argued over the women working the streets of a fast-growing London. Rossetti, who spent most of his life painting medieval dreams and languid beauties, turned just once to a scene from his own city. A young drover has come up from the country to sell a calf at market, the animal still roped in his cart, and in the road he recognizes his former sweetheart, now sunk into prostitution and shrinking from him against a wall. He designed it in 1853 and was still reworking it the year before he died in 1882, never able to resolve the perspective of the background behind them. It was the only contemporary subject he ever painted in oil, and it stayed unfinished on his easel to the end.