page_title: Water Willow (Rossetti)
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Water Willow (Rossetti) / Origins
caption_attribution_description: English: Chalk study for the 1871 painting Water Willow (Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington).
context_page_description: 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.
context_section_description: 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 the Morris children, in 1871, while Morris himself travelled to Iceland.  Rossetti made a version of Water Willow in coloured chalks at Kelmscott, and then painted the small oil "to fit a beautiful old frame I have" In the chalk study, Jane holds a pansy, symbol of love and remembrance, rather than the willow branches, a symbol of sorrow and longing, of the final painting.
  In 1877, facing financial difficulties, Rossetti sold the painting to "a new buyer", William Alfred Turner (1839–1886),  a Manchester cotton spinner, who also purchased Proserpine at that time. Rossetti apologized to Jane Morris for selling the work, saying he was "really mortally sorry to part with the Kelmscott picture" but "felt there was no alternative".
caption: Chalk study for Water Willow.  Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.
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