ABSTRACT
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was 28 and William Morris 22 when they met and became friends in 1856. In the autumn of the following year, Morris was one of the apprentices who worked with Rossetti decorating the walls of the Oxford Union's new debating hall with murals of subjects from Malory's Marte d'Arthur. That October, Rossetti met Jane Burden, a 17-year-old working-class girl whose father was employed in a livery stable, and persuaded her to model for a sequence of studies of Queen Guinevere. Tall and long-necked, with a pale ivory face, deep-set dark eyes, thick eyebrows and a mass of dark hair, Janey became for Rossetti and his group the incarnation of their medieval ideal of female beauty. She was the model for Morris's one easel painting, the portrait of 'La belle Iseult' (also known as 'Guinevere'), and the addressee of his poem 'Praise of My Lady', in which Morris adapted the medieval hymn of supplication to the Virgin Mary. Many of the features named in this litany are conventional attributes of the idealized female of courtly love lyrics; but as Georgiana Burne-Jones noted, the poem also offers a 'true' likeness, a 'faithful portrait', of Janey (i, 169):
My lady seems of ivory Forehead, straight nose, and cheeks that be Hollow'd a little mournfully.
