Fascinated by women’s physical allure, Rossetti here imagines a legendary femme fatale as a self-absorbed 19th-century beauty who combs her hair and seductively exposes her shoulders. Nearby flowers symbolize different kinds of love. In Jewish literature, the enchantress Lilith is described as Adam’s first wife, and her character is underscored by lines from Goethe’s Faust attached by Rossetti to the original frame, “Beware . . . for she excels all women in the magic of her locks, and when she twines them round a young man’s neck, she will not ever set him free again.” The artist’s mistress, Fanny Cornforth, is the sitter in this watercolor, which Rossetti and his assistant Dunn (who helped him here) based on an oil of 1866, now in the collection of the Delaware Art Museum.
P.S. Who were the women in Rossetti's paintings ... possibly muses or lovers?
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