Description: An iconic head of the damozel who is holding irises in her right hand; her head, looking downward to the left, is set against a gold background uniform with the gold of the area that would have had her drapery.
Subject: The emparadised woman
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Sancta Lilias (The Blessed Damozel) (central figure only)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
1874
Physical Description
Medium: oil
Technique: oil on panel
Dimensions: 19 x 18 in.
Frame: Original gold frame; filigreed gold flats with
raised outer gold molding carved in stylized floral pattern
Signature: Monogram
Date on Image: 1874
Note: A label on the back reads “Sept. 1874”.
Production Description
Production Date: 1874
Exhibition History: BFAC, 1883, no. 87; Tate, 1911, no. 2440.
Patron: The Hon. William and Mrs. Cowper-Temple
Original Cost: gift
Note: DGR gave the picture to the Cowper-Temples in gratitude for their hospitality when he visited them at Broadlands in August 1876. According to Charles Howell, the picture was originally offered to him.
Provenance
Current Location: Tate Gallery
Catalog Number: 2440
Archival History: The Hon. William and Mrs. Cowper-Temple (late Lord and Lady Mount Temple). Madame Deschamps presented the work, in memory
of her mother Georgiana (Lady Mount Temple) to the Tate in 1909.
Reproductions:
- Surtees, A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 2, plate 358.
(no image available) 
Carrington, Pictures and Poems [Note: On the fourth page of the text of The Blessed Damozel text.]- Ash, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, plate 33.
(no image available) 
Masterpieces of DGR (Gowans and Gray), page 53.
Stephens, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, page 87.
Radford, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, page 45.
The Blessed Damozel (Sancta Lilias) (print)
Electronic Archive Edition: 1
File Name: s244c
Copyright: © Tate Gallery, London 2001
Scholarly Commentary
Introduction
This unfinished work is extremely striking because of the uniform treatment of the gold background and the gold drapery of the damozel. The modelled head and hair appear to float not so much on as in this flat and shallow gold surface. The effect is visually contradictory, as if DGR had introduced a realistic and even voluptuous image into the kind of space typical of iconic and even byzantine work.
Production History
The picture was begun as an early version of The Blessed Damozel, but DGR cut it down “to a small single head picture”, as he told his studio assistant Treffry Dunn, after he had begun the larger picture again (quoted in Surtees I. 142). DGR recovered the picture (probably in 1876, when he gave the picture to the Cowper-Temples) in order to have its background completely gilded, as it in fact comes down to us. Both the gold background and the lilies are later additions, and the outer edges of the hair were also reworked when the gilding was added. In reworking the picture DGR left the damozel's gold dress unfinished. Nonetheless, since he gave the picture as a present to the Cowper-Temples, DGR must have thought it completed.
Pictorial
The picture not only forms part of the sequence of Blessed Damozel paintings and drawings, but relates as well to the three-quarter length work known as Sancta Lilias.
Bibliography