Found. Found is an unfinished oil painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, now in the Delaware Art Museum.
The painting is Rossetti's only treatment in oil of a contemporary moral subject, urban prostitution, and although the work remained incomplete at Rossetti's death in 1882, he always considered it one of his most important works, returning to it many times from the mid-1850s until the year before his death. Unlike the majority of Rossetti's work of the 1850s, which were small-scale drawings and watercolours characterised by medieval and early Renaissance revivalism, Found was Rossetti's only attempt at a contemporary subject, prostitution, that was done in oils.
Rossetti had addressed the topic of prostitution as early as 1847 in letters to his friend William Bell Scott, who wrote the poem Rosabell in 1846 on the topic. The Gate of Memory, a drawing Rossetti made c. 1854, shows a scene from Rosabell where a prostitute is beginning her evening of work, and views a group of innocent girls still at play dancing.
The drawing may have been intended to illustrate the poem in a book, but was painted as a larger watercolour in 1857, which was repainted in 1864. In 1870 Rossetti published a sympathetic poem about a prostitute, Jenny.
The artist Alexander Munro's maid Ellen Frazer may have posed for an early head-study for the fallen country girl of Found, and an ink-and-wash study of the compo
The painting is Rossetti's only treatment in oil of a contemporary moral subject, urban prostitution, and although the work remained incomplete at Rossetti's death in 1882, he always considered it one of his most important works, returning to it many times from the mid-1850s until the year before his death. Unlike the majority of Rossetti's work of the 1850s, which were small-scale drawings and watercolours characterised by medieval and early Renaissance revivalism, Found was Rossetti's only attempt at a contemporary subject, prostitution, that was done in oils.
Rossetti had addressed the topic of prostitution as early as 1847 in letters to his friend William Bell Scott, who wrote the poem Rosabell in 1846 on the topic. The Gate of Memory, a drawing Rossetti made c. 1854, shows a scene from Rosabell where a prostitute is beginning her evening of work, and views a group of innocent girls still at play dancing.
The drawing may have been intended to illustrate the poem in a book, but was painted as a larger watercolour in 1857, which was repainted in 1864. In 1870 Rossetti published a sympathetic poem about a prostitute, Jenny.
The artist Alexander Munro's maid Ellen Frazer may have posed for an early head-study for the fallen country girl of Found, and an ink-and-wash study of the compo
Wikipedia ...