On 10 February 1867, George Price Boyce dined at Tudor House in Cheyne Walk and recorded in his diary that Rossetti was at work on a beautiful painting of Ellen Smith, playing a musical instrument and singing a Christmas carol. He returned a month later, on 10 March, to find the work still on the easel. The picture Boyce watched take shape is the oil that passed through George Rae’s collection to the first Viscount Leverhulme and, following its sale at Sotheby’s in 2013, is currently on loan at the Petit Palais, Paris; the present sheet, in red and white chalk and dated the same year, is its close and finished counterpart, identical in subject.

The drawing depicts a half-length girl turned three-quarters to the left and raising her eyes as she sings. She holds a tall, narrow stringed instrument upright, slung from a strap that crosses to her shoulder, and plays it with both hands: the right raised to the head, the fingers curled over the neck near the pegs, the left lower down where the strings meet the body. The instrument was an exotic curio of Rossetti’s, owned for years and set in his pictures from The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice of 1853 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) to Forced Music of 1877. It is thought to be a short-necked North African fiddle of the rabab type, probably Algerian or Tunisian and properly played with a bow, though here Ellen Smith plays it with her fingers. She wears the loose Indian robe, a banyan-style gown patterned with the boteh or paisley motif, that Ellen Smith had already worn in The Beloved (1865-6, Tate Britain). In her hair, above the ear, she wears the coiled pearl brooch that served Rossetti as a studio prop throughout these years. Behind her, the ground is left in soft tonal modelling, with sprigs of holly, as a symbol of Christmastide, and a heart-shaped medallion bearing the Virgin and Child.

The instrument and the medallion together present the subject as sacred rather than amorous and distinguish the work from Rossetti’s many depictions of women with lutes and citterns. The song is named on the frame of the oil, where Rossetti set a legend of his own transcribing: Here a maid, well apparelled, sings a song of Christ’s birth with the tune of Bululalow: ‘Jesus Christus hodie Natus est de Virgine.’ Marillier traced the lines to the old Winchester mystery plays; Rossetti had gathered such carols in manuscript in the 1850s, and his draft of these very words survives in a notebook of 1867, now in the Duke University Library.

The robe, the brooch and the medallion belong to the items of Rossetti’s Chelsea studio in these years; the heart-shaped medallion had already served in Regina Cordium (1866, Glasgow Museums), where it carried a winged amorino; for A Christmas Carol the cupid is exchanged for the Virgin and Child. The brooch recurs across the pictures of these years, in The Beloved, Monna Vanna (1866, Tate Britain) and Joli Coeur (1867, Manchester Art Gallery); Rossetti was so taken with it, Murray Marks (dealer, collector and friend) recalled that on first acquiring it he sent at once for him to come and see it.

The model, Ellen Smith, was a Chelsea laundress Rossetti had taken up in 1863, who served him through the decade for the homelier of his types, neither the opulence of Fanny Cornforth nor the gravity of Alexa Wilding. She sat for Washing Hands (1865), The Beloved (1865–66), Joli Coeur (1867) and the three watercolours of The Loving Cup (1867), and was lent freely to Rossetti’s circle, modelling for Burne-Jones, Poynter, Spencer Stanhope and Simeon Solomon. A Christmas Carol was among her last sittings. Rossetti’s assistant Henry Treffry Dunn recorded that she sat for several of his sweetest pictures until her face was “sadly cut about and disfigured by a brute of a soldier, after which she could model no longer”.

A pencil study for the composition is in the British Museum, and the present drawing has commonly been described as a finished study made in preparation for the painting. Rossetti made autonomous chalk versions of his oils throughout the 1860s, for sale and for presentation, and the present work is most plausibly an independent replica worked up after the painting was complete, not the trial that preceded it.

The drawing’s first owner Aglaia Coronio (1834–1906), was the eldest daughter of Alexander Ionides, of the Anglo-Greek merchant family that stood at the centre of artistic London; her brother Constantine formed the collection now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, and her own friendships ran to Morris, to Watts and to Rossetti, who drew her in 1870. She was no passive collector. Aglaia had the gift of finding and arranging the fabrics on which Pre-Raphaelite pictures depended; Lady Burne-Jones credited her perfect taste with helping her husband a hundred times by finding stuffs and dressing his models, and she did the same for Rossetti. A drawing given in thanks for such services, perhaps for the very Indian robe the girl wears, would account for its passage to her without sale; she moved in 1869 to 1A Holland Park, beside the great Aesthetic interior her brother Alecco was making next door; the address inscribed on an old label to the reverse of the present work.

From Aglaia the drawing passed to Mrs Valpy, widow of the Bath solicitor Leonard Rowe Valpy, one of Rossetti’s steadiest patrons of the late 1860s; it was she who lent it to Manchester in 1911. There it remained for eighty years before re-emerging on the open market, and entering the distinguished collection of the present owner in 2015.