Bocca Baciata

This picture is sometimes confused with the other oil on panel version now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The present picture was the first version begun by DGR, although the picture in Boston was the first to be completed. DGR described the present version in a letter to George Boyce (5 Sept. 1859): “I was induced to throw [it] aside, on account of its being painted with a good deal of copal & on panel, a combination which I never before attempted & which I found produced an unpleasant glossiness of surface. I therefore. . .threw it aside after making considerable progress with it. Its design was different..., the head being in. . .the same action of the head as in the Golden Water which Ruskin has”.

Nevertheless, the picture is very close to the painting now in Boston. Mark Lasner's judgment is that the picture is a copy made by Fairfax Murray—or perhaps is Fairfax Murray's completion of the picture that DGR had begun.

Begun in 1859, it was not finished by DGR until later—if indeed it was finished by him at all.

• The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Watts, Tate 1997, 96-97.
• Fredeman, Correspondence, 59.35.
• The Pre-Raphaelites, Tate 1984, 24-25.
• Surtees, A Catalogue Raisonné , vol. I, no. 114.