Recently discovered and therefore not in Virginia Surtees' Catalogue Raisonné of Rossetti's work (1971), this fine drawing is a study for the right-hand figure in the foreground of The Bower Meadow (Manchester City Art Gallery), dated 1872. The model was Alexa Wilding, who so often sat to the artist from the mid-1860s on, although her long hair, left flowing in the painting, is put up with a plait going over her head in the drawing. 'Of Rossetti's models', Mrs Surtees writes, 'Miss Wilding's features are the most difficult to recognise. The auburn hair falling over a serene brow, the slightly heavy jaw-line, the lovely face recording a not-too marked intelligence which appear in Regina Cordium, Sibylla Palmifera, Venus Verticordia, are subsequently transformed by the artist into the languid features of the more mature women which look out of his later canvases' (op.cit,. p. 200, under no. 530).

The Bower Meadow dates from the period when Rossetti was deeply involved emotionally with Jane Morris, and enjoying what Wilfrid Scawen Blunt called his 'time of love' with her at Kelmscott Manor. The picture was actually started as early as 1850, when Rossetti painted the landscape background at Sevenoaks, intending it for a picture of Dante and Beatrice meeting in Paradise. This, however, was abandoned, and it was not until twenty years later that he took up the canvas again, utilising the background for a totally different subject. Completed by June 1872 when he suffered a severe mental breakdown, the picture as we see it today shows two half-length figures playing musical instruments in the foreground, while two girls dance in the middle distance and the landscape of 1850 fills the background.

With its inderterminate, musical theme and carefully controlled colour harmony, the picture could be classed as 'aesthetic'; but it also has the soulful melancholy, hinting at symbolic meaning, which characterises Rossetti's paintings associated with Jane Morris. Jane herself does not appear, but the sitters for both the principal figures had something of her statuesque beauty, the other musician on the left being modelled from Marie Spartali, Graham Robertson's 'Mrs Morris for Beginners'. Moreover, the picture has a distinct feeling of Kelmscott Manor, where Rossetti may well have worked on it during his stay there with Jane during the summer and autumn of 1871. The lush green landscape, grey stone buildings and groups of beautiful women seem to symbolise the place during his tenancy, when he was not only living with Jane but visited by Alexa Wilding and other models