Rossetti painting of his lover (who was also his best friend's wife) expected to sell for record £7million

• Jane Morris was the inspiration for Rossetti's 1871 work Pandora
• The wife of William Morris, she was Rossetti's also lover and muse
• She appears in a number of his paintings as well as the works of others
• The painting goes under the hammer at Sotheby's in London on Thursday
  

By Damien Gayle

Published: 12:11 EDT, 18 May 2014 | Updated: 13:24 EDT, 18 May 2014

Going under the hammer: Rossetti's 1871 painting Pandora, depicting his muse Jane Morris, is expected to sell for £7million at Sotheby's

A painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti is expected to set a new record for the artist when it goes under the hammer at Sotheby's this week.

Rossetti's 1871 painting Pandora, depicting his muse Jane Morris, is expected to sell for £7million, after more than 60 years off the market in a private collection.

The wife of Rossetti's friend, William Morris, who was also an artist and textile designer, Jane was also one of Rossetti's great loves and the subject of many of his best works.

Simon Toll, Sotheby's British and Irish art specialist, said that Pandora will be the star lot when it comes up for sale on Thursday.

'This is certainly the most important Rossetti that has ever been on the market,' he told the Sunday Telegraph.

'In fact, it is one of the most important pre-Raphaelite pictures ever to come to market market, because so many are in museum collections.'

The sale comes just after the close of a National Portrait Gallery charting Jane Morris's lifetime as an artist's muse, during which she was inspiration for a string of paintings.

With her pale skin and tumbling curls, twinned with her strong Olympian features, Jane was perhaps the epitome of pre-Raphaelite beauty.

Her likeness became the basis for some of the movement's most-recognisable works, including Rossetti's Proserpine, depicting Persephone, goddess of the underworld, which he considered his most beautiful creation.

Her husband, meanwhile, chose to portray her as King Arthur's famously beautiful - and notoriously unfaithful - Queen Guinevere in an 1858 painting that also goes by the title La Belle Iseult.

Other artists to work with Jane included Edward Burne-Jones, who immortalised her likeness in a succession of stained glass windows; and Evelyn de Morgan, one of the few female Pre-Raphaelite painters.

Ethereal: Rossetti's 1850 work, The Bower Meadow, also includes a depiction of Jane Morris

After years as a cult art obsession, interest in the work of Rossetti and his fellow pre-Raphaelites is at a peak at the moment. Mr Toll said if any of the artist's paintings were set to make a high price, this is the one.

Previously in the hands of a now-elderly collector and Rossetti enthusiast, who bought it in 1966 when there was little demand for the artist's work, its value is riding high on the back of the National Portrait Gallery's Jane Morris exhibition as wel as a recent blockbuster Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at the Tate Britain.

Mr Toll said the recent high-profile accorded to the movement 'has brought people into the market who might not have known who these artists were, or at least are now looking at them in a different way.'

Beauty: Morris as Astarte Syriaca, the Middle Eastern deity, and in Rossetti's Day Dream (right)

Rossetti joined with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais to start the Pre-Raphaelite movement in 1848. The aesthetic movement decried the realism brought into art by Renaissance painters and sough a return to the intense colour and detailed compositions that characterised works of previous centuries.

With her strong features and poise, Jane Morris became the personification of the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of beauty. Born Jane Burden on the October 19, 1839, she was the daughter of a stableman, Robert Burden, and his laundress wife Ann Maizey, from Oxford.

Although she was undoubtedly beautiful, she seemed destined for a life of obscurity until a chance encounter with a group of artists outside a theatre at the age of 18 changed her life forever.

Edward Burne-Jones and Gabriel Dante Rossetti were in Oxford to complete work on a mural for John Ruskin, then the UK's leading art critic and the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University.

Spotting her outside Oxford's Drury theatre, the pair were enraptured by her beauty and Morris' modelling career began.

Jane, for her part, was smitten by Rossetti but he, at the time engaged to Lizzie Siddal, his other great muse, didn't reciprocate.

Instead, she became engaged to his friend, William Morris, whom she met through Rossetti and sat for on several occasions.

The pair married in 1859 and went on to have two daughters, Jane and Mary, with whom they lived in the beautiful Kelmscott Manor on the Gloucestershire-Oxfordshire border.

Despite her humble background, the new Mrs Morris had few problems fitting into upper class society, refining her accent to the point where friends described it as 'queenly' and later inspiring Vernon Lee's 1884 novel Miss Brown, which in turn inspired the musical and film, My Fair Lady.

But although she and Morris appear to have been happy, Rossetti remained in the background and after Siddal's death, their affair began in earnest.

The relationship would last, off and on, until his death in 1882, and she would go on to star in some of his most famous works.