Donna in giallo

The woman in soft golden tones is Annie Miller. A few years earlier she had been the great project of the painter Holman Hunt, who found her working in a Chelsea pub, meant to educate and marry her, and left her to sit for his friends while he travelled in the Holy Land. Rossetti was one of those friends, and the sittings turned into an affair that helped undo the engagement. By 1863 all of that was behind them, and he painted her plainly here, in the manner of an old Renaissance portrait rather than as a goddess or a heroine. That same year he used the same face for a picture of Helen of Troy, the woman blamed for a ten-year war.