Jane Morris

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the 1870s Rossetti and Jane Morris, the wife of his friend William Morris, became involved emotionally and are believed to have had an extended affair. In 1871 the two families jointly rented Kelmscott Manor, near Oxford, and Rossetti lived there between 1872 and 1874. In the summers, while Morris travelled to Iceland to study Norse sagas, Jane and their two daughters took up residence at Kelmscott. Rossetti's studies of Jane made during this period have a relaxed domenstic quality, showing her seated and reading or dreaming. Later, the artist used them as a foundation for major symbolic compositions such as "Mariana" (see MMA 47.66).

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art