Calendule

By 1873 Rossetti was living much of the year at Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, the old house he rented jointly with William Morris and filled with Morris's wife Jane as his model and muse. This picture is a quieter thing. The girl arranging marsh marigolds on a shelf was not one of his famous stunners but a local child he called Little Annie, the daughter of the manor's gardener, who sometimes helped in the house. He painted her there in the spring of 1873 and finished the work early the following year. The flowers were the first of the season, and he leaned on their old country name, marybuds, for the tie to the Virgin in the alternative title he gave the picture, Fleur-de-Marie.