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Rossetti’s Pandora given £7million price tag

 
Great beauty: Dante Gabriel Rossetti used William Morris’s wife Jane as the model for his painting Pandora
Standard Reporter
11 March 2014

A giant painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti not seen at auction for half a century is expected to make up to £7 million when it is sold in London this spring.

Pandora takes for its model Jane Morris, the wife of Rossetti’s friend William Morris, with whom he had an affair after the death of his own wife, Lizzie Siddal. She became an important muse.

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In Greek myth, Pandora was handed a box by the god Zeus and ordered not to open it — but unleashed evil into the world when she ignored the warning.

When Rossetti painted Pandora, starting in 1868, he had recently been persuaded to open his wife’s grave to remove a manuscript of poems from her coffin, which was said to have unleashed torments for himself.

The painting is a highlight of Sotheby’s sale of British and Irish art on May 22.

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