The Beloved (Rossetti)

The Beloved
Artist	Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Year	1865–1866
Medium	oil on canvas
Dimensions	80 cm × 76 cm (31 in × 30 in)
Location	Tate Britain, London

The Beloved (also The Bride) is an oil painting on canvas by the English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), now in Tate Britain, London.^[1] Rossetti signed his initials (as a monogram) and the date as "1865-6" on the bottom left of the canvas.^[2][3] It depicts the bride, or "beloved", from the Song of Solomon in the Hebrew Bible as she approaches her bridegroom, with her attendants.

The bride, caught in the action of moving back her veil, is attended by four virginal bridesmaids and an African page, who contrasts strikingly with the red hair and pale skin of the bride, and the varying shades of brunette hair and skin tones of the four bridesmaids. It has been suggested that this colour contrast, carefully painted as a frame to the bride's features, was influenced by Édouard Manet's controversial painting Olympia, in progress when Rossetti visited Manet's studio in late 1864 while working on The Beloved, and the painting also owes much to the works of Titian.^[4]

In many respects, the painting fits into the series of "bust-length oil paintings of beautiful women" which were Rossetti's main painted output from 1859 to about 1867. These were a conscious change of style, to explore painterly effects of (in his words) "flesh painting" and colour, abandoning the densely packed narrative scenes, in media other than oil painting, he had produced over most of the 1850s, when he followed more closely the ideals of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.^[5] These grew "larger and more luxurious" in the next decade,^[3] and included Bocca Baciata, Venus Verticordia, Beata Beatrix, The Blue Bower, Monna Vanna, Regina Cordium, and Lady Lilith.^[6] But these were all rather tightly framed pictures of a single figure, "in confined layers of space", with varying props and background, reflecting a variety of historical periods.^[7]

It is generally agreed that Rossetti set out to show a range of skin colours within the figures, but the identification and interpretation of these varies greatly.