Vernon Lushington Thomas Hughes, and Richard Buckley Litchfield, became a unifying force at the College. He was a friend to artists, authors and activists, particularly those of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Arts and Crafts Movement who gravitated to the Working Men's College. In 1856, it was he who first introduced Edward Burne-Jones to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his college rooms. Rossetti used Lushington’s wife, Jane, as a model in 1865. Lushington, friend of William Morris, was a frequent visitor to Kelmscott Manor. He was a close friend of Leslie Stephen and his family; Stephen’s daughter Virginia (later Woolf) based her character
Portrait of a Lady Known as Smeralda Brandini Pourtalès Gorgier for 3,400 francs in 1865. Charles Augustus Howell bought it on behalf of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1867 at Christie's; Rossetti boasted that he had it for £20. It was bequeathed to the V&A with the collection of his patron Constantine Alexander Ionides, who had bought it from Rossetti for £315 in the 1880s. Dante Gabriel Rossetti refers to the painting in his comments on his poem "For Spring, by Sandro Botticelli": <poem> "What masque of what old wind-withered New-Year" "Honours this Lady?* Flora, wanton-eyed" "For birth, and with all flowrets prankt and pied" </poem> with his reference: