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
Alice Boyd ménage à trois was established: Boyd spent winters with William and his wife in London, while they came to Penkill in the summers. Other Pre-Raphaelite artists and their friends also came to Penkill work on their art, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. In 1862, Dante Gabriel Rossetti drew Boyd's portrait in profile. Trained by Bell Scott, Boyd worked in similar genres: historical and mythical subjects, landscapes, and portraits. She also illustrated some of Bell Scott's poems. After his death in 1890, her output dropped off steeply. She did not exhibit much, if at all, during her