William Morris Society of Canada knows how to do cake!

http://www.wmsc.ca/2014/03/its-over-and-inspiration-lingers.html

Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting The Day Dream by Frederick Shields, 1880

John Everett Millais - Awful Protection against Midges (Scotland, 1853)

This drawing comes from a series of about twenty-five amusing records that Millais made as a visual diary of his stay in Scotland with John Ruskin and his wife Effie. It was on this holiday at Brig o’Turk, taken between July and October in 1853, that Millais painted his famous portrait of John Ruskin standing beside Glenfinlas Falls and became deeply infatuated with his wife, Effie. Millais was an avid fan of the humorous magazine Punch and on returning from Scotland he showed the results of the lighter side of his trip (his relations with Ruskin having become naturally somewhat strained) to his friend, the Punch cartoonist John Leech. Although Millais was delighted to see his sketches published he asked for them to be anonymous. The images “would never go with the serious position I occupy in regard to Art”. 

Awful Protection Against Midges was published on the 12th November 1853. It appeared with the title Ingenious protection against midges - a valuable hint to sketchers from nature. Simplified by Leech for the wood block engraving, the Punch illustration lacks the delicate detail of the original drawing. Millais had written to his friend Martha Combe from Brig o’Turk on the 6th September describing this well-known Scottish pest. “There is one drawback to this almost perfect happiness - the midges. They bite so dreadfully that it is beyond human endurance to sit quiet, therefore many a splendid day passes without being able to work”. Martha and Thomas Combe were important Pre-Raphaelite patrons. 

The kilted figure on the left is Millais’ pupil and friend, the artist Michael Halliday in his adopted native attire. On the right may well be Millais himself, however Millais usually portrayed himself with exaggerated gangly legs and arms. An alternative candidate is Millais’ brother William, who can be seen sketching in another of the drawings smoking a similar cheroot. William’s favoured pastime was trout fishing for breakfast.

http://www.leicestergalleries.com/19th-20th-century-paintings/d/pre-raphaelite/john-everett-millais/13407

Priestess of Delphi - John Collier 1891

John William Waterhouse - Head of Orpheus - a Sketch (England, c.1899 - 1900)

Oil on board

This symbolist work is a study for the head of Orpheus in Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus (1900), which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1901 and 1922. The atmosphere in the finished painting is both tranquil and one “of wonder”.(1)

The time and thought devoted to it are attested not only by the preliminary pencil and oil sketches showing significant differences in composition, but by a full-scale study of the floating head, comparable in treatment to the finished work.(2)

Mr J. W. Waterhouse stands mid-way between Burne-Jones and Leighton; his aim is not so much to reconstruct, with truth of local details, the legendary past, as to re-tell the stories, pictorially, in a fashion of his own. There is more of dream than of conscious thought, probably, in Mr Waterhouse's Head of Orpheus, red hair twined round the lyre, as it floats in a rock-set pool of the Hebrus, watched by two sad-eyed nymphs.(3)

1. R. de la Sizeranne, The Art Journal, 1901, page 165
2. Anthony Hobson, The Art and Life of J. W. Waterhouse RA 1849-1917, Studio Vista/Christies 1980
3. R. de la Sizeranne, The Art Journal, 1901

John William Waterhouse - Mermaid, 1900

Frederick Sandys. May Margaret.

Sleep, 1893, Simeon Solomon

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A Sea Spell

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Juana del Arco