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Jane Morris (née Burden)

3 of 28 portraits by Emery Walker Ltd

© National Portrait Gallery, London

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Jane Morris (née Burden)

by John Robert Parsons, copied by Emery Walker Ltd
bromide print, July 1865
8 1/4 in. x 6 1/8 in. (208 mm x 155 mm) image size
Given by Emery Walker Ltd, 1956
Photographs Collection
NPG x137525

Sitterback to top

  • Jane Morris (née Burden) (1839-1914), Embroiderer and artist's model; wife of William Morris. Sitter associated with 31 portraits.

Artistsback to top

  • Emery Walker Ltd, Photographers. Artist associated with 28 portraits.
  • John Robert Parsons (circa 1826-1909), Figure and portrait painter, photographer and art dealer. Artist associated with 7 portraits.

This portraitback to top

The painter and poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was one of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He first saw Jane Burden, a poor and uneducated woman, when she was just seventeen. Enchanted by her unconventional beauty he asked her to model for him. Jane was soon married to Rossetti's friend William Morris. After Rossetti's wife died he became obsessed with Jane, finding any excuse to gaze at her. In 1865, he commissioned these photographs of his sensual, statuesque model in preparation for the first of his many paintings - one way to possess her.

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Events of 1865back to top

Current affairs

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson is the first female to be awarded a doctor's licence. She is also involved in collecting signatures for the Manchester Suffrage Committee, the first suffrage organisation, formed this year. John Stuart Mill was also elected to parliament this year on the platform of women's suffrage.
Palmerston dies in October, and is replaced as leader of the Liberal government by his Foreign Secretary, Lord Russell.

Art and science

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is published, inspired by Carroll's relationship (as Oxford don Charles Dodgson) with his friend Henry George Liddell's daughter Alice.
Matthew Arnold publishes the first series of Essays in Criticism, a defining text in the development of English literature as an academic discipline.

International

In the American civil war, Robert E. Lee surrenders the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant, leading to the surrender of the Confederacy's remaining field armies. A few days later, US President Abraham Lincoln is shot dead by Confederate sympathiser John Wilkes Booth. Later this year slavery is officially abolished after years of fierce campaigning. In response, the first branch of the Ku Klux Klan is founded on Christmas Eve.

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