Water Willow (Rossetti) 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 to the right. In May 1871, William Morris rented Kelmscott Manor, a 17th-century limestone manor house along the Thames near Kelmscott in Oxfordshire, to be a summer escape from London. Rossetti shared the lease, but the house soon became a retreat for Rossetti and Morris's wife Jane to have a long-lasting and complicated liaison. The two spent an idyllic summer there, with
Christina Rossetti Later she became involved with the linguist Charles Cayley, but declined to marry him, also for religious reasons. The third offer came from the painter John Brett, whom she likewise refused. Rossetti sat for several of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's most famous paintings. In 1848, she was the model for the Virgin Mary in his first completed oil painting, "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin", which was the first work to be inscribed with the initials "PRB", later revealed to signify the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The following year she modelled for his depiction of the Annunciation, "Ecce Ancilla Domini". A line from her