The Spirit of the Rainbow

This is the only finished, full-length female nude that DGR is known to have executed. DGR intended to fill in the background with a rainy landscape of trees, perhaps with a waterfall as well. That the woman represented in the drawing was Watts-Dunton's mistress, as Sydney Cockerell told Virginia Surtees, seems to be obliquely borne out in James Douglas's biography of Watts-Dunton. Douglas pointedly does not name the model for this drawing, though he observes that she was also the model for the half-nude picture known as Forced Music and he suggests—in the running head covering his treatment of these works—that Watts-Dunton regarded her as “The Loveliest of all Rossetti's Models” (Douglas II. 277).

The drawing illustrates Watts-Dunton's sonnet “The Wood-Haunter's Dream”, a dream account of “The Spirit of the Rainbow” who is represented as a kind of “belle dame sans merci” (“God gives the world the Rainbow, her the rains”).