Dante Gabriel Rossetti
This exhibition was held at the Walker Art Gallery in 2003/4.
Watercolour on paper, drawn in 1855, 34.3 x 41.9cm, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
This is a close copy of a composition of 1851, the first work in which Elizabeth Siddal serves as the model for Beatrice.
The subject comes from the 'Vita Nuova'. Beatrice, disapproving of Dante's attentions to another woman, refuses to greet him when they meet at a marriage feast. Beatrice does not know that he has only pretended to favour the other woman in order to conceal his purer love for her.
This was one of the 13 subjects from the 'Vita Nuova' that Rossetti had envisaged for pictorial treatment as early as 1848.