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
Dante Gabriel Rossetti depicted a prostitute, lifted from the street by a country drover who recognises his old sweetheart. However, Rossetti increasingly preferred symbolic and mythological images to realistic ones, For many years, Rossetti worked on English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri's "La Vita Nuova" (published as "The Early Italian Poets" in 1861). These and Sir Thomas Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur" inspired his art of the 1850s. He created a method of painting in watercolours, using thick pigments mixed with gum to give rich effects similar to medieval illuminations. He also developed a novel drawing technique in pen-and-ink. His first published