Janey Morris: Pre-Raphaelite Muse
Small exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of pictures of Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris, model and embroiderer. I thought I had a good knowledge of Jane Morris but I learnt a lot from this small display. I hadn’t know she had an epileptic daughter who she nursed and that not only did she probably have an affair with Rossetti but also with Wilfred Scawen Blunt, a poet and Irish and Egyptian nationalist. I got a real sense of her having a lot of female friends in her circle and I loved a picture of her on holiday in Sienna with two daughters of an MP and one of their husbands, taken against a photo study backdrop of the city with the man lounged at the women’s feet. One of the women went on to become the first women on the London County Council. I also liked the four pictures of her as an older lady only one of which was printed at the time and the plates of which were found in a skip!