Lady Lilith

Dante Gabriel Rossetti · 1867-01-01T00:00:00Z

The artist identified the subject on a label attached to the original frame: "Beware of her fair hair, for she excells [sic]/ All women in the magic of her locks,/ And when she twines them round a young man's neck/ she will not ever set him free again." These lines are taken from Shelley's translation of the Walpurgisnacht scene in Goethe's "Faust." Here, as in Rosetti's other drawings and paintings of Lady Lilith, the artist's mistress, Fanny Cornforth, served as the model. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's drawing is one of two watercolor replicas of the painting of Lady Lilith in the Bancroft Collection in the Delaware Art Museum. It is attributed partly to Henry Treffry Dunn, one of Rossetti's assistants.