Silence

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his fellow British artists of the avant-garde Aesthetic Movement increasingly questioned the ideal of “finish” and publicly exhibited sketches and studies like this one. Rossetti made countless drawings and paintings of his lover, the textile artist and model Jane Burden Morris. This work likely began as a study for the 1868 painting La Pia de’Tolomei, but Rossetti made it into an independent work of art, representing silence with the iconography of the veil and the peach branch, which he described as “the symbol used by the ancients; its fruit being held to resemble the human heart and its leaf the human tongue.” The passages of blank, unmarked paper likewise suggest the idea of silence.