Burne-Jones portrays Marie Stillman half-length, turned almost in profile to the left, her head bowed and her eyes lowered. Her hair is drawn back from the brow and gathered loosely at the nape, and she wears a dark blue-grey bodice with a ruffled jabot falling from a bow at the throat. The face and neck are smoothly modelled in pale tones, with a touch of red on the lips; the dress is laid in with quick, broken strokes that thin out towards the lower edge, and the background is a grey scumble so slight that the weave of the canvas shows through.

Portraits form a small part of Burne-Jones’s output. He painted his family and a few friends, and seldom accepted commissions from outside that circle; his wife recorded that portrait-painting was distasteful to him, and that he made exceptions only for special reasons. ‘I do not easily get portraiture’, he admitted, ‘and the perpetual hunt to find in a face what I like, and leave out what mislikes me, is a bad school for it’ (Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, London, 1904, vol. 1, p. 299). He believed that a portrait should convey ‘character and moral quality, not … anything temporary, fleeting, accidental’, and the lowered eyes and closed lips of the present work reflect that view.

Marie Stillman, née Spartali, was born in London on 10 March 1844, the elder daughter of Michael Spartali, a merchant who served as Greek consul-general from 1866 to 1879. The Spartalis belonged to the community of Greek merchant families settled in the capital, among them the Ionides, Cassavetti and Coronio households, who were among the chief patrons of Rossetti, Whistler and Burne-Jones in the 1860s. Marie and her younger sister Christine are said to have first attracted the attention of Whistler’s circle at the Tulse Hill house of Alexander Constantine Ionides. ‘We were all à genoux before them’, Thomas Armstrong recalled, ‘and of course every one of us burned with a desire to paint them’ (Thomas Armstrong, A Memoir 1832-1911, London, 1912, p. 195). Swinburne reportedly remarked that Marie was so beautiful he wanted to sit down and cry (Graham Robertson, Time Was, 1931, p. 13). Christine sat to Whistler for La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1863–65; Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC).

Whistler introduced Marie to Rossetti in 1864, and when she wished to take up painting he sent her to Ford Madox Brown, under whom she trained for several years. Julia Margaret Cameron photographed her in costume in the late 1860s. Rossetti made many studies of her in the summer of 1869, telling Jane Morris that he found her head ‘about the most difficult I ever drew’, and he gave her features to one of the attendant ladies in Dante’s Dream (1871; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), to a figure in The Bower Meadow (1872; Manchester Art Gallery) and to the heroine of A Vision of Fiammetta (1878; private collection).

In 1871 Marie married William James Stillman, an American painter and journalist and a widower with three children. Her father, though opposed to the match, settled an allowance of £400 a year so that the couple could remain in England. They lived at first in London and on the Isle of Wight, then in Florence from 1878; Stillman later wrote that the city suited his wife, ‘whose enjoyment of Italian art was intense’. In 1883 Marie and the younger children returned to England, and from 1886, when The Times appointed Stillman its correspondent for Greece and Italy, the family was based in Rome. Throughout these moves Marie continued to exhibit her own work: at the Dudley Gallery, the Royal Academy, the Grosvenor Gallery and the New Gallery, and in America. Henry James called her a ‘spontaneous, sincere, naive Pre-Raphaelite’. More than a hundred and fifty of her pictures are known, most of them watercolours of subjects from Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Shakespeare.

Burne-Jones had known her since the mid-1860s, when she bought his watercolour Cupid Discovering Psyche, 1866, now in the British Museum. She also owned a red chalk study circa 1866, St George and the Dragon: The Return of the Princess, inscribed ‘E.B.J. to M.S.’, which she lent to the exhibition of his drawings at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1899. At the end of the 1860s, Burne-Jones fell in love with her cousin Maria Zambaco. Marie Spartali, Maria Zambaco and Aglaia Coronio, known in their circle as the Three Graces, are traditionally identified as the three young women dancing in Burne-Jones’ The Mill (Victoria and Albert Museum, London), dated 1870 but reworked until the early 1880s.

It was acquired in 1882 by Constantine Alexander Ionides, son of Alexander Constantine Ionides, and bequeathed by him to the museum in 1900. Marie’s features have also been recognised in The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon (1881–98; Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico). Her role as a model is best documented in Danaë (The Tower of Brass) (1887–88; Glasgow Museums), for whose heroine she sat: a study of her head of 1885 is at Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales. In 1886 Maria Zambaco, who had by then turned to sculpture under Alphonse Legros, modelled a portrait medal of her cousin, inscribed with Marie’s name and the year, and bearing a lily with the words Sine macula; an example is in the British Museum.

The Burne-Jones catalogue raisonné dates the present portrait to 1880, when the Stillmans were living in Florence. Burne-Jones did not travel to Italy after 1873, so the sittings presumably took place during one of Marie’s visits to London. The picture remained at The Grange, Burne-Jones’s house in Fulham, where it can be seen hanging in a contemporary photo.

A view of Burne-Jones’ ‘Garden Studio’, The Grange, West Kensington, showing the present portrait hanging upper right

In January 1900, eighteen months after the artist’s death, his son Philip reproduced it in The Magazine of Art, in an article on the works his father had left incomplete, and it was among those shown in the Garden Studio at The Grange in 1900 and 1901.

Burne-Jones’s executors consigned the painting to the sale of his remaining works at Christie’s on 5 June 1919, lot 171. It reappeared at Sotheby’s, London, in 1987 and entered the collection of Chris and Priscilla Whittle. In 2003 it passed through Peter Nahum At The Leicester Galleries to Bob and Annie Weinstein, and it was shown in the gallery’s exhibition Medieval to Modern in 2004. The Weinsteins sold it at Sotheby’s, New York, in 2017 where it entered the present collection. 

The unfinished state of the picture shows the order in which Burne-Jones worked. He brought the face to a high finish first; the dress and background had been no more than laid in when he set the canvas aside. The same procedure appears in his portrait of his wife Georgiana with their children Philip and Margaret, begun in 1883, on which, she noted, he worked ‘for years at intervals’ without ever finishing it to his satisfaction: Georgiana is painted in full detail, while the children behind her are only lightly sketched.

Burne-Jones’ portrait of Marie is markedly different from those of his contemporaries such as Rossetti’s dazzling renditions of her. Characteristically, Burne-Jones offers a muted, sensitive and introspective vision. These distinct portraits have Symbolist connotations and were deeply admired within his artistic circle.