Love's Messenger

Love's Messenger
Love's Messenger
Artist	Marie Spartali Stillman
Year	1885
Type	watercolor basic
Dimensions	81.3 cm × 66 cm (32.0 in × 26 in)
Location	Delaware Art Museum, Wilmongton

Love's Messenger is an 1885 watercolor by Marie Spartali Stillman in which a dove has just carried a love letter to a woman standing in front of an open window. She wears a red rose, and has just put down her embroidery of a blind-folded Cupid.^[1]^[2]

The artist modestly described the painting in 1906:

I wish I could tell you something interesting about my pictures at Mr. Bancroft's [,] they are merely studies of heads done for the pleasure of painting. The effect of a fair head in a certain bull's eye window of a friend's studio where I was working one winter suggested Love's messenger - that is all... [Love's Messenger] is merely a study from a model. My daughter Effie who was then at school [was] not able to sit for me to complete it from her. I painted a landscape from the Villa Borghese Rome as the background when I made several changes in the picture while in Rome.^[3]

Critic Jan Marsh suggests that the studio with the bull's eye windows may have been in Edward Burne-Jones's house "The Grange" in Fulham.^[2]

The painting, paper mounted on wood, was purchased in 1901 by Samuel Bancroft and is now in the Delaware Art Museum.

^ Binkowski, Kraig; Delaware Art Museum (2004). Delaware Art Museum: Selected Treasures. London: Scala. p. 136. ISBN 9781857593204.
^ ^a ^b Cite error: The named reference Dreams was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ Quoted in Waking Dreams, p. 262.

[DAM_Treasures-1] Binkowski, Kraig; Delaware Art Museum (2004). Delaware Art Museum: Selected Treasures. London: Scala. p. 136. ISBN 9781857593204.

[Dreams-2] Cite error: The named reference Dreams was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[3] Quoted in Waking Dreams, p. 262.

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