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
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: