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
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.