Dante Gabriel Rossetti had been one of the original members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded in 1847 but when his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, died of a laudanum overdose in 1862, he grew increasingly detached from the original group. It was in March 1868 that William Graham was introduced to Rossetti, becoming one of the artist’s most important patrons.

In her autobiography, published in 1933, Frances Horner (née Graham) recalled visits with her father to Rossetti’s London studio in the 1860s. ‘He was’, she stated, ‘the first man of genius I had ever known well, and it was a great excitement going to his home in Cheyne Walk’.¹ Of her experience as his model,  she noted: ‘I went to sit for him, my eldest sister [Alice] coming as chaperone (considered desirable in those Victorian days) and he made her read aloud, The Ring and the Book, which was then coming out’.²

Here Frances, aged fifteen, is depicted as ‘La Donna della Finestra’ (‘The Woman at the Window’). Frances is turned to the right, leaning her right arm on a ledge in front of her; with her left hand she holds the loose end of a scarf which is tied round her hair and falls forward over her shoulder. A small scroll with almost indecipherable writing is attached to a curtain in the right background. On it is a canzone in Italian from Dante’s La Vita Nuova of 1294, a collection of poems dedicated to the expression of courtly love:

Videro gli occhi miei quanta pietate

Era apparita in la vostra figura

Quando guardaste li atti e la statura

Ch’io faccio per dolor molte fiate

Allor m’accorsi che voi pensavate

La qualità de la mia vita oscura,

Sìcché mi giunse ne lo cor paura

Di dimostrar negli occhi mia viltate.

E tolsimi dinanzi a voi, sentendo

Che si movean le lagrime dal core,

Ch’era sommosso da la vostra vista.

Io dicea poscia ne l’anima trista:

‘Ben è con quella donna quell’Amore

Lo qual mi face andar così piangendo.’³

In this poignant scene, the poet Dante, grieving the death of his beloved Beatrice, sees ‘a young and very beautiful lady’ looking at him ‘from a window with a gaze full of pity.’⁴

Frances, in her autobiography, recalled the moment when Rossetti’s drawing was brought to the family home in Grosvenor Place: 

It was supposed to be the lady at a window whom Dante saw and to whom he lifted his eyes when Beatrice was most unattainable. I was rather ashamed, because I thought the hands were so large; I felt everyone would look at them and say, ‘What enormous hands she has.’ It hangs now at Mells, but he never painted the picture from me, for which it was a study.⁵

In a letter dated 19 February 1869 to Rossetti, William Graham affectionately refers to Frances as ‘La donna della finestra’.⁶ Rossetti returned to the same subject again with several versions using Jane Morris, wife of William Morris, as the model for the lady in the window (for instance, La Donna della Finestra, 1870, Bradford Art Gallery). In 1871, Graham acquired Rossetti’s large-scale oil Dante’s Dream (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), based on Dante’s Vita Nuova, which the artist had translated in the late 1840s.

Many years later, when the picture hung in the White Room, Frances Horner recorded dispassionately: ‘The chalk drawing over the mantelpiece was done by D. G. Rossetti from Lady Horner when she was fifteen – as Frances Graham. It is supposed to represent a lady to whom Dante lifted his eyes when pining for Beatrice, and was a study for an oil painting he intended to paint’.⁷