In the last month of 1878 Leonard Rowe Valpy arranged with Rossetti that a Miss Williams, the daughter of a widowed lady at Tunbridge Wells, should sit for a chalk portrait. William Michael Rossetti recorded the commission in his account of his brother’s work, and the artist’s own letters record its completion. Writing to Theodore Watts on 18 April 1879, Rossetti expected the last sitting from Miss Williams on the Sunday; ten days later he told Watts that he had finished her head that day from the model. The drawing is dated 1879 in the lower left, beside the monogram, and it belongs to a particular and unusually settled moment in Rossetti’s last decade.

The year of the drawing was a good one for Rossetti, and the fact bears on its character. The breakdown of 1872 and the long invalid years that followed had given way, after Rossetti’s return to Cheyne Walk late in 1877, to an interval of comparative health. The quarrel with Ford Madox Brown was over, he had resumed regular relations with his brother, and through 1878 and 1879 he completed a sequence of commissions with a steadiness that had deserted him for much of the decade, though the depression and the chloral were never far away. It was to Watts, the solicitor and critic who became the closest companion of his last years, that he reported his progress on the Williams head. The portrait belongs to that recovered interval, and the composure of the sheet is of a piece with it.

The patron behind the commission, Leonard Rowe Valpy, was a London solicitor of severe religious scruple, said to have been disquieted even by the sight of a pair of bare arms, and yet from 1867 among Rossetti’s most loyal patrons. He had owned the great oil Dante’s Dream (1871) in the middle of the decade before agreeing in 1878 to give it back in exchange for other works, the picture passing in 1881 to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. A patron of such scruple would not have arranged a sitting carelessly, and the portrait that resulted is chaste by the standard of Rossetti’s pictures of these years: no jewelled costume, no amorous attribute, no sidelong glance at the viewer, only a young woman’s head and the fall of her hair against a plain ground.

Edith Williams is bust length, her head turned almost to full profile, and her hair, a deep coppery auburn, falls loose in long waves framing her face.

The blue paper places the drawing within a defined category of Rossetti’s late work. From the late 1860s he had made a practice of the large, highly finished chalk head on tinted paper, worked in layers of subtly varied colour and intended to be framed and shown as a finished picture in its own right, not used as a preparatory study. These sheets, as the artist found, were also a reliable source of income. The present drawing is one of them. Its closest cousins are the coloured-chalk heads of Jane Morris of exactly this kind, among them Reverie of 1868 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), and the type persists to the very end in the Pandora he drew in 1879 for Watts himself. The silhouetting of the head against a pale field, cut off below in a sweeping line, recurs in the study for The Blessed Damozel of 1876 (Manchester Art Gallery, Surtees no. 244B) and in the chalk head of Alexa Wilding dated 1873. The Williams sheet sits squarely in that company.

It differs from most of them in a single important respect. The Morris heads are personifications, the model’s features pressed toward myth and named for a mood, Reverie, Pandora, La Donna della Fiamma. Rossetti has Edith as a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, the loose hair and the long throat answering the type he had spent twenty years perfecting, but the sheet stops at the likeness and does not push it into allegory. The set of the mouth and the directness of the gaze carry a composure that reads now less as an ideal than as the portrait of a particular and capable young woman of twenty-eight, and her later life confirms it.

For Edith Williams did not remain the quiet daughter of a Tunbridge Wells widow. On 28 July 1892, at Langton Green, she married Arthur Sackville Trevor Griffith-Boscawen, a Welsh-born Conservative of Rugby and Oxford who had been adopted the year before as Unionist candidate for the Tunbridge division of Kent. The match was unusual, for she was some fourteen years his senior, and by every account it was a love-match. He sat in the Commons for more than thirty years, for Tunbridge until 1906 and for Dudley from 1910, was knighted in 1911, and rose to be Minister of Agriculture and then Minister of Health. In his Memories of 1925 he called her his constant companion and helpmeet of twenty-seven years, and believed that her death in 1919 had cost him the Dudley seat two years later.

She was, on the record of her own Times obituary, far more than a politician’s wife. She was a capable public speaker and Chairman of the Women’s Branch of the National Unionist Association, an office of real weight in the party machinery of the day, and through the First World War she worked on war pensions and war savings and campaigned for the Victory Loan. The grave, self-possessed girl of Rossetti’s sheet became one of the organising women of Edwardian and wartime Conservative politics. Rossetti drew that steadiness thirteen years before her marriage, and a full generation before the public work that would draw on it.

Commissioned for the sitter’s mother, the present work stayed with Edith and passed down in her family, lent under the Boscawen name to the City of Norwich Museums between 1977 and 1982, and reached the open market only after a century in the sitter’s descent, at Sotheby’s in 1983 and again at Christie’s in 2015, where the present owner acquired it. It has never been a picture of the trade. Rossetti drew many beautiful women in his last decade, most of them models engaged for the head he wanted and turned, on the tinted sheet, into Pandora or Proserpine or Reverie. This is one of the few that left his studio as the portrait of a named sitter who would go on to a public life of her own.