Mnemosine

Dante Gabriel Rossetti began this in 1875 as an oil study of Jane Morris, the wife of his friend William Morris, and by then their long attachment had mostly turned to memory. He worked at it on and off until 1881, the last full year of his life, when his health and his reliance on the drug chloral were both failing him. He named the figure Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory and mother of the muses, and gave her a lamp and a sprig of pansy, the old flower of remembrance. The shipowner Frederick Leyland bought the picture and hung it in his London drawing room among five other Rossetti women. It was one of the last of the tall, brooding female faces the painter turned out in his final decade.