3-044-460 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Marie Spartali, 1870. Greek in heritage and British by birth, Marie Spartali (1844-1927) was the daughter of the Greek consul general in London. A sought-after model for her beauty, she posed for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and Ford Madox Brown. Spartali studied painting with Rossetti and Brown and developed a personal style that combined elements drawn from Renaissance art and contemporary culture. She used watercolor and gouache to obtain a soft-dreamlike quality in her work. Her work was exhibited with the Society of Female Artists in London, and shown at the Dudley Gallery, London, in 1867, the Royal Academy, London, in 1873, a gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1873, and the 1878 Universal Exposition in Paris, among others. In 1871 she married William Stillman (1828-1901), an American journalist, photographer, and early follower of John Ruskin.