Blanzifiore

Blanzifiore is an old Italian word for the snowdrop, the pale flower the woman holds here. Rossetti painted it in 1873, in the years after a breakdown had driven him out of London to a leased manor house at Kelmscott, where he lived quietly and painted the same few faces again and again. The snowdrop is one of the first flowers of the year, and Victorians read it two ways at once, as a token of consolation and of death. Rossetti used the same flower in his pictures of Proserpine, the goddess carried off to the underworld, and this small canvas grew out of that group. The head fills nearly the whole panel, close and frontal, the way he built most of his late half-lengths.