Maria Spartali Stillman

Maria is an unusual figure among the Pre Raphaelites in that she used her own artistic talents - as well as functioning as a Muse or model to the male artists.  
Other wives and mistresses of the artists were more likely to be assistants rather than active  in the artistic world.  Georgiana Burne Jones had some  talent and studied painting and etching but she found that her role as mother and housekeeper and social hostess for her family took up more of her time -and although it upset her, she ended up abandoning her attempts to work for herself. Jane Morris was a skilled embroideress and her daughters who were the next generation of women learned “arts and crafts” also and worked in that field… but Jane herself did not paint…

However Maria Spartali was a working painter.  She was the cousin of Maria Zambaco who was Edward Burne Jones’s great love and mistress.  She was born in London in 1844, the daughter of a wealthy Greek merchant… Michael Spartali and his wife, Euphrosyne, who was also of Greek descent.

  He had artistic tastes and liked to mingle with writers and painters.  He had a large house in Clapham just outside London.   Maria and her other cousins were noted beauties with the sort of unusual striking looks that Pre Raphaelite painters liked and found interesting.  She was very tall, with rich brown hair and a commanding presence. She wanted to paint herself as well as being a model for artists and began to take lessons from the painter Ford Madox Brown.  He was already teaching his own 2 daughters Lucy and Catherine (Lucy would later marry William Rossetti, the brother of Gabriel and Christina).   She began training with Madox Brown in 1864 and took her studies very seriously.  She also began to model for Burne Jones and Gabriel Rossetti, sitting for pictures such as The Bower Meadow and a study of Dante…

1n 1871 she married William Stillman an American Journalist who also painted.  Her parents were against the marriage but they went ahead and spend time in England, in Florence and also America.   She painted seriously and produced a large body of work, in spite of having 3 children and 3 step children

Like all Pre Raphaelites, Maria  painted scenes form literature including Dante and Shakespeare. ...her work also included portraits and self-portraits.  One of her best known paintings is Loves Messenger, a study of a medieval lady, receiving a message form a lover carried by a dove.

She died in Kensington in 1927.. having left behind a large body of work and a reputation as a beauty and the most “intellectual” of artist’s models…