A Amada

Most of Rossetti's pictures are a single dreaming woman filling the frame. This one is a crowd, six figures gathered around a bride lifting her veil, taken from the Song of Solomon in the Hebrew Bible. He built the whole thing around colour. The bride's red hair and pale skin sit at the centre, framed by the darker hair and skin of her attendants and, in front, a Black child holding a cup of roses. Rossetti had visited Manet's studio in Paris in 1864 while the scandalous Olympia was still on the easel, with its own stark play of a pale woman against a dark servant, and something of that seems to have carried back into this. Several of his models were real Londoners of the day, among them Fanny Eaton, born in Jamaica, whose face appears near the back.