La Bella Isotta

This is the only easel painting William Morris ever finished. He tried to be a painter in the late 1850s, working alongside Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and this was the one canvas he saw through. The model is Jane Burden, a young woman from Oxford whom he married the following year, in 1859. He has dressed her as Iseult, the tragic heroine of the Tristram legend, in a crowded medieval room thick with pattern, brass, embroidery, and a little dog on the rumpled bed. Morris struggled badly with the figure and gave up painting soon after. What he did not give up was all the rest of it. The fabrics and wallpapers and hand-made objects packed into this picture are what he spent the next 40 years actually making.