Monna Pomona

By 1864 Dante Gabriel Rossetti had turned away from the crowded medieval scenes of his youth toward something simpler and more sensuous: a single woman, filling the frame, surrounded by things you can almost smell and touch. This one he called Monna Pomona, after the Roman goddess of orchards and ripening fruit, and he loads the little watercolour with her attributes — apples, blossom, strung pearls, a fall of loose hair. The model was a young woman named Ada Vernon. Rossetti's wife, Elizabeth Siddal, had died two years earlier, and across that decade he built a whole gallery of these idealized faces. He worked the watercolour with gum until it glows almost like oil.