pencil on paper
9 3/8 x 7¾ in.
The drawing is not included in Virginia Surtees' catalogue raisonné of Rossetti's work, but it appears to date from the 1860s and to represent Ellen Smith, who frequently sat to him during this decade. His first recorded likeness of her, a drawing in the Birmingham Art Gallery, dates from 1863, and she modelled for a number of works a few years later. They included Washing Hands (1865), The Beloved (1865-6), Joli Coeur (1867), A Christmas Carol (1867), and the three watercolour versions of The Loving Cup (1867).
Ellen Smith was neither as voluptuous as Fanny Cornforth nor as soulful as Alexa Wilding or Jane Morris. Her charms were of a homelier order, and she was in fact a Chelsea laundry girl as well as being, like so many of Rossetti's models at this period, of equivocal virtue. She also sat to Burne-Jones, Poynter, Spencer Stanhope, Simeon Solomon, G.J. Pinwell and G.P. Boyce, who often mentions her in his published diary.
Smith's modelling career had an abrupt and unhappy ending. According to Rossetti's assistant H.T. Dunn, this 'sweet young girl...got her face sadly cut about and disfigured by a brute of a soldier and then of course she was of no more use as a model'. By 1873 she had settled for matrimony and gone back to laundering. On 17 February that year Boyce recorded in his diary that 'Ellen Smith, now Mrs Elson, called on me to tell me she had been married about three weeks ago to an old acquaintance and suitor, a cabman. She wishes to do some laundry work on her own account as her husband's earnings are small'. The kind-hearted Boyce had already helped her financially on previous occasions, and no doubt he obliged yet again.
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