My Lady Greensleeves 1863

Curator: Here we have Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1863 oil painting, "My Lady Greensleeves," currently housed at the Fogg Museum. A Pre-Raphaelite vision that… well, what's your immediate feeling when you look at her? Editor: A melancholic ballad rendered in paint! Her eyes, though strikingly pale, seem heavy, weighted down by a sadness only whispered, never spoken. There's something dreamlike, but not necessarily pleasant, about this lady. Curator: The Pre-Raphaelites often sought to capture a kind of idealized beauty rooted in the medieval past, didn't they? This painting reflects their interest in Romanticism and literary themes. "Greensleeves," of course, is a well-known traditional English folk song, often associated with unrequited love or longing. Editor: It's interesting how he translates music, a temporal art form, into a static portrait. But isn't there a tension between the simplicity of the song’s subject and the ornate details Rossetti includes, like the blossoms that curl along the frame and the implied grandeur of her dress? That tension speaks volumes about the complex role of women, or more accurately, portrayals of them, in the art and popular imagination of the Victorian era. Curator: Rossetti wasn't always interested in accurate historical representation, mind you. More often, he created aesthetic experiences designed to evoke a mood or emotion. "My Lady Greensleeves," like many of his portraits of women, could be viewed as reflecting the artist's personal desires and ideals rather than an authentic historical figure. And speaking of ideals…the model, Alexa Wilding, appears quite often in his work. Editor: Exactly! It becomes less about *the* Lady Greensleeves, and more about Rossetti's artistic vision *of* the Lady Greensleeves—mediated through contemporary expectations of beauty and Victorian constructions of womanhood. I think her enduring power as an image rests in its layers of projection, its cultural coding. It reminds us how our notions of femininity have been built upon so many expectations and cultural fantasies. Curator: It really does offer more questions than answers, doesn’t it? She is beautiful, haunting, an enigma trapped in paint and time. Editor: A bittersweet reminder of how the stories we tell, or paint, shape our perceptions of each other.