Study for "Water Willow"

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Date: 1871

Materials: Black, brown and red chalk

In the spring of 1871, Morris and Rossetti took joint tenancy of Kelmscott Manor, asixteenth-century manor house by the Thames in Oxfordshire. Morris immediately went on an extended trip to Iceland, leaving his wife Jane and Rossetti to spend the summer there together.  

In the final painting, she holds branches of willow, symbol of sorrow, with the house, church and river at Kelmscott in the background. In this simplified version in chalks, Jane bears an even more soulful expression, and carries, with no little irony, a pansy - conventionally a token of fidelity and remembrance.