DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
(London 1828 – 1896 Birchington-on-Sea)

Annie Allen, A Study for ‘Marigolds’

Colored chalks and pencil on paper
20 x 17 ½ inches (50.8 x 44.5 cm)

Provenance:

The Artist’s sale; Christie’s, London, 12 May 1883, lot 41, “Fleurs de Marie; Study for the Head in the Picture named Fleurs de Marie (or the Bower-maiden or The Gardener’s Daughter). C. 1874,” (27 gns to Knowles).
Charles E. Feinberg, Detroit
With Zeitlin & Ver Brugge, Los Angeles; by whom sold to:
Cass Canfield, New York; his gift in 1972 to:
Joan H. King, New York, until 2000; by descent to:
George and Sarah King, New York, until 2023.

Literature:

Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882): A Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford, 1971, p. 134, cat. no. 235A (as present whereabouts unknown).

This sensuous drawing of a red-haired beauty served as a study for Rossetti’s painting Marigolds, now in the Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery (Fig. 1).[i] The drawing and painting were made at Kelmscott Manor, the celebrated Cotswolds estate that Rossetti and William Morris jointly leased in 1871. Rossetti lived and worked there until 1874, in the company of Jane Morris, William’s wife and Rossetti’s muse, model, and sometime lover. But the model for Marigolds and the subject of the present work was in fact Annie Allen, the niece of Philip Comley, the gardener at Kelmscott Manor.  

Affectionately known as “Little Annie,” Annie was thirteen or fourteen years of age when Rossetti began work on Marigolds in the spring of 1873. He then set it aside, reserving it against a “money call” that did not take place until the following year. Early in 1874 he resumed work on the painting, writing to his patron Frederick Leyland on 31 January 1874:

I shall call the picture either “Spring Marybuds” or “The Bower Maiden.” It represents a young girl (fair) in a tapestried chamber, with a jar containing marybuds (or marsh marigolds, the earliest spring flowers here), which she is arranging on a shelf. Near her is a cat playing with a ball of worsted. The picture abounds in realistic materials & is much like the Veronica in execution & not inferior to that picture in colour.[ii] 

Rossetti had finished the painting by February 23rd when he wrote to his mother, telling her that he was sending it to William Graham, who would soon buy the picture, describing it thus:

It is one of little Annie, the niece of the Cumleys [sic], whom you may remember; indeed you will perhaps call to mind the beginning of the picture, which I took in hand last Spring, but have only just resumed and finished. It represents a young girl putting a jar containing Mary-buds on a mantelshelf. There is a great deal of accessory work in it now —including a black kitten playing with a ball of thread; and in pictorial qualities I think it is as successful as any of mine. I call it The Bower Maiden.[iii]

Rossetti’s brother, William Michael Rossetti, later wrote of the painting,

At the beginning of this year 1874 Rossetti was again occupied with the picture which he had commenced in the preceding spring, entitled “The Bower Maiden”—a girl in a room with a pot of marigolds and a black cat. It was painted from “little Annie” (a cottage-girl and house assistant at Kelmscott), and it “goes on” (to quote the words of one of his letters) “like a house on fire.” This is the only kind of picture one ought to do—just copying the materials, and no more: all others are too much trouble.[iv]  

He further notes that the painting “was finished early in February and sold to Mr. Graham for £682 after it had been offered to Mr. Leyland at a rather higher price and was declined. It has also passed under the names Fleurs de Marie, Marigolds, and the Gardener’s Daughter.”[v] Jane and William Morris’s daughter May, who inherited Kelmscott Manor, later wrote “Annie was our gardener’s niece and her wonderful fair hair, transparent eyes, and milk-rose complexion are to be see in Rossetti’s ‘Gardener’s Daughter,’ painted at Kelmscott.”[vi] Annie herself would marry a local farmer, Thomas William Wheeler, in 1885.[vii]

 Rossetti employed Annie Allen as a model only for Marigolds, transforming her into one of his “stunners,” the ideal ecstatic beauties for which he is celebrated. It is thus not surprising that former owners of the drawing had believed the subject to be by one of Rossetti’s better-known subjects, either Elizabeth Siddal or Marie Spartali Stillman. It was the Rossetti scholar Virginia Surtees who properly associated the drawing with Marigolds, noting that while there are lightly drawn lines describing the outstretched arms that would appear in the finished painting, here Rossetti had explored an alternate solution, with the subject holding the flowers to her chest. She wrote: “The action of the hand…as opposed to the finished work I suppose simply indicates a change of mind!”[viii]

Although the pose of Annie Allen is essentially retained in the finished painting, the characterizations of the figures are quite different. The languorous sensuality of the subject in the drawing, with her hair uncovered, eyelids lowered, and inviting half-smile seems a Rossettian fantasy, conceived out of time and without context, while in the painting the artist seems to have reverted to a more traditional depiction of a servant—admittedly a beautiful one in a sybaritic environment—garden shears dangling from her waist, as she goes about her task in silence.

Our drawing was sold at Rossetti’s estate sale the year following his death in 1882.  It was later in the collections of the noted book collector Charles E. Feinberg and the influential publisher Cass Canfield.

[i] Oil on panel, 45 x 29 inches (114.3 x 73.7 cm). Signed with monogram, and dated 1874, lower right. No. NCM 1956-90. See: Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882): A Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford, 1971, vol. 1, p. 134, cat. no 235; vol. 2, pl. 335.

[ii] Francis L. Fenell, Jr., The Rossetti-Leyland Letters: The Correspondence of an Artist and His Patron, Athens, Ohio, 1978, p. 58, cat. no. 72; William Fredeman, The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Cambridge, 2006, vol. 6, 74.21. The “Veronica” was Rossetti’s painting Veronica Veronese, which Leyland had purchased from Rossetti in 1872. It was later in the collection of Samuel Bancroft, whose collection was donated to the Delaware Art Museum in 1935.

[iii] Fredeman, Correspondence, vol. 6, 74.36; William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: his family letters, London, 1885, vol. 2, p. 304.

[iv] William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel as Designer and Writer, London, 1889, p. 91

[v] Rossetti, Dante Gabriel as Designer, pp. 91-92.

[vi] J. R. Dunlop, ed. The Introductions to the Collected Works of William Morris, New York, 1973, vol. 1, pp. 306-307; quoted in Peter Faulkner, “William Morris at Kelmscott,” Journal of William Morris Studies, 17, no. 4 (Summer 2008), p. 10.

[vii] Annie is listed as age 11 in 1871 census as the niece of Philip and Harriet Comley (not “Cumley” as in Rossetti’s letter) and 21 in the 1881 census, where she is described as a cook and domestic servant. Her marriage certificate gives her name as Ann Luker Allen.

[viii] Letter of Virginia Surtees, London, 17 October 2000.