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
Dante Gabriel Rossetti Cornforth (described delicately by William Allington as Rossetti's "housekeeper") in her own establishment nearby in Chelsea, and painted many voluptuous images of her between 1863 and 1865. In 1865, he discovered auburn-haired Alexa Wilding, a dressmaker and would-be actress who was engaged to model for him on a full-time basis and sat for "Veronica Veronese", "The Blessed Damozel", "A Sea–Spell", and other paintings. She sat for more of his finished works than any other model, but comparatively little is known about her due to the lack of any romantic connection with Rossetti. He spotted her one evening in the Strand