COVE

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive at this location. 

This watercolour and graphite drawing of Elizabeth Siddal (on paper, laid on fine linen on a stretcher) is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The monogram and date are inscribed at lower right. The monogram design belongs to 1863 or later. The date is ambiguous, and may indicate that the drawing was begun in 1850, and...

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive at this location. 

This watercolour on paper by Dante Gabriel Rossetti was commissioned by John Ruskin in 1855. The watercolour illustrates an episode from Dante's Purgatorio, Canto XXVII. This is one of two watercolours dealing with subjects from Dante commissioned by Ruskin in April 1855. The other is...

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive at this location. 

There is only one version of this picture by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a small watercolor in the Tate Gallery. It describes, against a striking background of blue tiles, two queens playing on a clavichord with one hand each while their other hands play a set of...

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive at this location. 

Executed in late 1857 and exhibited at the Liverpool Academy in 1858, this "A Christmas Carol" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (watercolour) was bought in mid-1859 by James Leathart for 80 guineas. DGR told Leathart it was one of the best watercolours he had ever done and advised him that "to be seen favorably [it] ought to be hung...

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive at this location. 

This remarkable picture by Dante Gabriel Rossetti is a watercolor painted over a carte de visite photograph of Elizabeth Siddal. According to G. C. Williamson, DGR made the portrait in May 1861 while attending at the bedside of his wife shortly after she gave birth to her dead child on 2 May (at their home, 14 Chatham Place...

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive at this location. 

This work by Dante Gabriel Rossetti is often (and not incorrectly) read as a memorial to his wife, Elizabeth Siddal. It is more than that, however. He had begun it on canvas years before his wife's death in early 1862, as he told Ellen Heaton in a letter of 22 December 1863 (see Surtees 1.93). Drawings of all kinds from as...

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive at this location. 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (oil on canvas), was begun in August 1848 and completed for exhibition in March 1849. Christina Rossetti was the model for the Virgin; Gabriele Rossetti was the model for St. Anne.  Old William (a family dependent) sat for St. Joachim. Both William...

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's original portrait of Christina Rossetti was completed around 1850. As William Michael Rossetti explains, "The portrait of my sister given in the present volume is taken from a pencil drawing done by Dante Gabriel, which remained quite unnoticed (and by myself forgotten) until I turned it up among her miscellanies after her death. It is much like her, and is possibly the sweetest version of her face that he or anyone ever produced. I should not be surprised if it were a slight study preliminary to the picture...