나의 여인 그린슬리브스

By 1863 Rossetti had largely left behind the crowded medieval subjects of his early Pre-Raphaelite years. He had begun painting single women in close-up, half-length, glowing in saturated colour — figures owing less to any story than to the Venetian painters he loved, Titian and Veronese. Pictures like these, made for private collectors rather than the public, fed a new taste for beauty pursued for its own sake, the mood that would grow into the Aesthetic movement. This is one of them. The title borrows from the old Tudor song about a lady dressed in green, and green is the whole key of the painting, banked around the sitter's loosened auburn hair. His companion Fanny Cornforth modelled many of these sensuous heads, though sources differ on who sat for this one.