Hesterna Rosa

The Latin title means yesterday's rose, and it points to a life already spoiled. The scene comes from a play of the 1830s about a medieval Flemish rebel, Philip van Artevelde. In a curtained tent two men sit gambling at dice, careless and absorbed, while the women who have spent the night in their company are left to their own thoughts. One of them, at the left, turns away and half covers her face, caught in a moment of self-reckoning. Rossetti had first drawn this composition years earlier, in the 1850s, and came back to it in watercolour in 1865. In the corner he set a small ape, an old emblem of lust, quietly watching the whole scene.