Dante's Vision of Rachel and Leah

Ruskin, who commissioned this picture, praised it highly (see his letters to Ellen Heaton of November 1855 in Surtees, A Catalogue Raisonné, I. 35-36.). The two women, seated at the fountain in the Earthly Paradise, “symbolise the active and the contemplative life. Leah, the active one, works with tendrils of honeysuckle and carries a red rose in her long loose hair. Both flowers had connotations of sexual attraction for Rossetti. She wears a green dress, the colour of life. Rachel is dressed in purple, the colour Rossetti often associates with inactivity and sometimes even with death” ( Grieve, The Pre–Raphaelites , Tate 1984, 276 ). This dichotomy of “Soul's Beauty” and “Body's Beauty” of course runs throughout all of DGR's work.

In April 1855 Ruskin proposed to DGR that he do a series of seven pictures illustrating the Purgatorio . DGR executed two, this picture and the watercolour Dante's Vision of Matilda Gathering Flowers . The two were completed sometime in the late summer or early fall 1855, after Madox Brown had suggested various improvements, in particular to this picture. On 3 September DGR told Brown that it had been greatly improved and that Ruskin paid £30 for it. In November Ellen Heaton became involved with the picture through Ruskin's generosity and it passed to her at that time (see Fredeman, Correspondence,55. 45; 55. 57 ).

The literary source is Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XXVII. 94-108 .