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
Emelia Russell Gurney that has endured. When Hill in 1898 was formally presented with a portrait, she made a speech of thanks in which she mentioned particular supporters who were dead: Emelia Gurney with Sydney John Cockerell, F. D. Maurice, Jane Senior and William Shaen. The Gurneys knew Francis Galton, through his wife Louisa Jane (née Butler). It was at their house that Gerard Manley Hopkins met Christina Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. The Gurneys bought works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Emelia was a supporter of Emily Ford. She had been taken to Rossetti's studio in 1862 by Ellen Heaton, a friend.