ABSTRACT
As the climactic scene in the story of a fallen woman, the most compelling visual cue in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Found is the state of the heroine's clothing: her tattered dress startlingly out of fashion even on the day Rossetti embarked on the decades-long project of the painting. Found is the artist's most famous exploration of a contemporary subject. The first complete drawing for Found is dated 1853, three years before wire-cage crinolines came into use. In this early drawing, the skirts of the female figure are thick enough to conceal her legs. Rossetti and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood often shied away from images of crinolined angels in favour of women like the one in Found- that is, women with a startling sexual presence. Most often, the presence was sustained by clothing them in a body-revealing garment. The Pre-Raphaelite resistance to images of crinolined women demonstrates an opposing view of the female body.
