Study for 'Marigolds - The Bower Maiden, Fleur-de-Marie'

Marigolds (Nottingham Castle Museum, fig. 1) was painted at Kelmscott in the spring of 1873, before being rested and continued at the beginning of 1874. It was also known as The Bower Maiden, Fleur-de-Marie, and The Gardener’s Daughter, as the sitter was ‘little Annie’, the daughter of the Kelmscott Manor gardener who occasionally helped in the house. Her hood was one typically worn for housework, and in the finished picture she is shown placing a vase of marigolds on the mantle-shelf in the Green Room at Kelmscott. Rossetti felt the picture was modern and naturalistic, writing to Frederick Leyland, the patron for whom it was intended, ‘I shall call the picture either Spring Marybuds or The Bower Maiden. It represents a young girl (fair) in a tapestried chamber, with a jar containing marybuds (or marsh marigolds, the earliest spring flowers here), which she is arranging on a shelf. Near her is a cat playing with a ball of worsted. The picture abounds in realistic materials & is much like the Veronica [Veronica Veronese] in execution & not inferior to that picture in colour. I never made a pen-&-ink sketch of it—the whole depending, like Veronica, on direct painting from nature—thus I cannot send you a sketch to look at: but you would be quite certain to like the picture & it would be a general favourite.’ (see Rossetti's letter to Leyland of 31 January 1874, in ed. W. Fredeman, The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1874.21).
As Rossetti notes in his letter to Leyland, he did not make any sketches of the composition, and the present drawing appears to be the only study related to the picture. While it is clearly a study for the pose and head angle of Marigolds, it is far more sensuous and intimate than the finished picture. The model looks out at the viewer with lowered eyelids and a coquettish half-smile, familiar from similar head studies of Alexa Wilding, Fanny Cornforth, and Jane Morris, Rossetti’s better-known ‘Stunners’. Her hair is uncovered, she lacks the delicate blush of little Annie in the final picture, and is altogether more knowing in her gaze. The pentimenti in the figure’s arms show Rossetti considering the raised arms seen in Marigolds, but forgoing them here as the model reaches towards her clavicle. The unfinished nature of the drawing, with the head fully rendered in rich pastel, but the body left as spare outlines, suggests that this may have been an early experiment in a certain profile view, which was then explored more fully in Marigolds.