Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

As his inscription shows, William Michael Rossetti identified the first drawing with his brother's poem 'Eden Bower', composed between 2 August and the end of September 1869. The two are contemporary, and the drawing represents the poem's protagonist, Lilith, who, in Talmudic legend, was the wife of Adam before he married Eve. 'Eden Bower', according to William Michael in his book Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer (1889), 'presents Lilith as a serpent...who had been changed into the form of a woman...; being discarded for Eve's sake, she re-consorts with her old serpent-mate, and plots with him the temptation which is to expel Adam and Eve from Eden'.

Rossetti had already touched on the theme in his sonnet 'Body's Beauty', written in the mid-1860s and published in 1868; and this too has a contemporary pictorial counterpart: the life-size canvas Lady Lilith (Wilmington, Delaware) of 1864-8. However, although the imagery of the two poems is comparable, the painting and the drawing are very different in concept and composition.

The second drawing is a very youthful sketch dated by Professor Fredeman in his Rossetti Cabinet to circa 1840, when the artist would have been about twelve. While this seems plausible, the Professor was surely wrong to describe the drawing as a 'portrait of an unidentified woman'. It has every appearance of being a copy after an antique bust, probably known to Rossetti via an engraving. The style may be hesitant and immature, but the artist has signed his production with adolescent swagger.