La signora William Morris

Rossetti painted this in 1868, and the woman in the blue silk is Jane Morris, wife of his friend the designer William Morris. By this point Rossetti was in love with her, and she with him, an attachment more or less known to everyone around them, William included. He lettered a line of Latin onto the picture that says, roughly, that she is famous as the wife of a poet and more famous still for her face, and now let her be famous through his painting of her. He posed her in a heavy blue gown he owned and used again and again, a red rose at her waist, her hands and throat given the same slow attention he brought to her features for the last decade of his life. It hangs today at Kelmscott Manor, the country house he and William Morris rented together three years later, where he and Jane spent their summers.