Jane Morris Jane Morris Jane Morris (née Jane Burden; 19 October 1839 – 26 January 1914) was an embroiderer and English artists' model who embodied the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of beauty. She was a model and muse to William Morris (1834–1896), the English textile designer, poet, novelist, translator, and socialist activist, whom she later married, and to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Jane Burden was born in Oxford, the daughter of a stableman, Robert Burden, and his wife Ann Maizey, who was a laundress. At the time of her birth, her parents were living at St Helen's Passage, in the parish of St Peter-in-the-East, off
Dante Gabriel Rossetti inspired by a vision of a woman who bids him combine the human and the divine in his art. Rossetti was always more interested in the medieval than in the modern side of the movement, working on translations of Dante and other medieval Italian poets, and adopting the stylistic characteristics of the early Italians. Rossetti's first major paintings in oil display the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. His "Girlhood of Mary Virgin" (1849) and "Ecce Ancilla Domini" (1850) portray Mary as a teenage girl. William Bell Scott saw "Girlhood" in progress in Hunt's studio and remarked on young