Jane Morris: Study for "Mariana"

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Long attracted by Jane Burden Morris’s unconventional beauty, Rossetti placed her at the center of this sheet, which he began as a head study, then developed to represent Mariana from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Tennyson’s poem Mariana in the Moated Grange. Her expression and dejected posture convey frustrated desire and weary resignation—in both sources, Mariana waits unhappily for a tarrying fiancé. The artist likely intended the theme to echo Jane’s real-life dilemma, as about 1868 her nine-year marriage to William Morris grew strained and she became increasingly close to Rossetti. The drawing relates to a painting Rossetti made in 1870, now in the Aberdeen City Art Gallery and Museum, and echoes lines from act 4, scene 1 of Shakespeare's play, where Mariana listens to a song that includes the line, "Take, O take, those lips away..." In the painting the artist replaced the vase of flowers with a singing boy, and gave Mariana a piece of embroidery to hold rather than a sprig of sycamore-fig, peach or willow leaves.

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