Dante Gabriel Rossetti Heaven. Around 1860, Rossetti returned to oil painting, abandoning the dense medieval compositions of the 1850s in favour of powerful close-up images of women in flat pictorial spaces characterised by dense colour. These paintings became a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement. In them, Rossetti's depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He portrayed his new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism, whilst Jane Burden, the wife of his business partner William Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess. "As in Rossetti's previous reforms, the new kind of subject appeared in the context
Water Willow (Rossetti) it being a great favourite of hers." The original was bequeathed to the Delaware Art Museum by Bancroft's descendants in 1935. The painting was exhibited in Manchester in 1882 and again in 1887, London in 1883, and Philadelphia in 1892. It was also exhibited in Wilmington, Delaware in 1917 and 1934, New Haven, Connecticut in 1976, and Liverpool and Amsterdam in 2003. Water Willow (Rossetti) Water Willow is an 1871 oil painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It depicts Jane Morris in the river landscape near Kelmscott Manor, with the manor in the left background and Kelmscott Church below the hill