Proserpine face swap

Where this one comes from

Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted Proserpine at least eight times through the 1870s, starting again whenever a canvas was damaged, refused or sold on. The version here is dated 1882, the year he died. The model every time was Jane Morris, wife of the designer William Morris, and the sonnet on the scroll in the upper corner is Rossetti’s own.

What is in the picture

She holds a pomegranate with a bite out of it, and the bite is the entire story: Proserpine ate the seeds below ground and so was bound to return there for part of every year. Rossetti put her in a corridor with one shaft of daylight behind her, an incense burner at her elbow and a sprig of ivy for clinging memory. The neck is longer than a neck, the fingers are longer than fingers, and the green of the sleeve was mixed to fight the red of the fruit.

When people use it

For Sunday evening. It is the picture for a small irreversible decision — the mail sent, the paper signed, the second helping taken — and for the long stretch of consequence that comes after it.

How your face lands in it

Her head is turned about a third away and tipped downwards, with the light coming from behind, which makes this one of the moodier results in the catalogue — your face lands already half in shadow. The hair is the largest thing in the frame and none of it changes, so anyone with short hair gets a surprise worth having. The mouth is doing a lot of work in the original, and a closed-mouth photograph holds it together best.

Proserpine — Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1882. Dante Gabriel Rossetti died in April 1882, so the painting has been in the public domain in the United Kingdom, across the European Union and in the United States for many decades. Source

Also in: Paintings · Victorian portraits