The Day Dream

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Day Dream depicts Jane Morris, the artist’s muse, seated in the fork of a sycamore tree with a sprig of honeysuckle in her hands. Painted slowly over a decade and finished in 1880, the work merges portrait and landscape into a single vision of suspended reverie. The honeysuckle — the emblem of devoted attachment — and the woman’s distant gaze make the painting one of the most haunting expressions of Rossetti’s late Pre-Raphaelite idealism.