Charlotte Polidori

In 1853 Rossetti was 25 and in the thick of the Pre-Raphaelite years, but this is not one of the dreaming red-haired women he is remembered for. It is his aunt. Charlotte Lydia Polidori was the practical, steadying figure in the family, and through the 1850s she helped her nephew again and again, with money and with sense, when his affairs were in their usual tangle. He drew several of his relatives that year in plain pencil, likenesses meant for the family rather than for show. She sits composed and middle-aged, looked at with the straightforward attention he usually saved for people he loved. The Polidori side was the literary one, and her brother John had once been Byron's travelling doctor.