Elements of D. G. Rossetti’s early career smack of Gothic intrigue, from brushes with exhumed graves to Bluebeardian jealousy. After his wife Elizabeth Siddal died in 1862, possibly of suicide from a laudanum overdose, Rossetti buried his letters and poems twined with Elizabeth’s hair in her grave at Highgate Cemetery. Seven years later, he infamously had the manuscript volume of his poems exhumed, “add[ing] a touch of the macabre to the life story.” With a nod to Gothic confinement, his well-known paintings such as Water Willow (1871) and Proserpine (1874) perpetuate the romantic fantasy that William Morris jealously kept his wife Jane away from Rossetti, a rival lover, under lock and key at Kelmscott Manor.

Certainly, a fixation on medieval and Gothic themes was a major draw for fans of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The movement had revived the pleasures of medieval and Gothic romance among young Englishmen like Walter Crane, who reminisced on his early reactions to its enchanting aesthetic:

Yet Rossetti’s later works shifted away from themes of Arthurian and Gothic romance, engaging with Gothic forms in more subtle ways. Distancing himself from the original group of Pre-Raphaelite Brothers from his early career, his later works progressed from works of Mariolatry to large, often full-bodied female portraits.

Rossetti’s paintings of the 1860s often feature portraits of women who are oversized and seemingly ill-proportioned to the frame. These paintings are intensely stylized and aestheticized, set within a wide range of historical contexts.