1. 🖼️ Isabella and the Pot of Basil’, William Holman Hunt, 1867.

2. 🖼️ ‘Isabella and the Pot of Basil’, George Henry Grenville Manton, 1919.

3. 🖼️’Isabella and the Pot of Basil’, John William Waterhouse, 1907.

In the 1890s, Caleb gave Minna her first camera. Recognising the commercial potential of her photographs, Keene registered her studies for copyright in 1903. She worked in South Africa and England and gained recognition producing portraits, landscapes, nature studies, and scenes of everyday life.

Born in 1861 in Germany, Keene (née Bergmann) (1861-1943) she moved to England around the late 1870s or early 1880s, where she worked as a governess and met her husband, artist and decorator Caleb Keene.

🖼️ ‘A Christmas Carol’, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1857-8, Fogg Art Museum.

🖼️ ‘A Christmas Carol’, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1867.

🖼️ ‘The Blue Closet’, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1857, @tate.bsky.social.

Amis and Amile were devoted companions and knights, born on the same day, look identical, and share everything, becoming like ‘second selves’. After being apart for a few years, ‘they lighted down from their horses, and embraced and kissed each other, and gave thanks to God that they were found.’

The centerpiece of the design features a kneeling pair, with angels flying above in a sunbeam lit sky. The couple are embraced by nature and surrounded by wild flowers.

This drawing must have been exhibited as it bears an inscription, which partly reads-
‘ to hold a small Exhibition of, Jewelry, and Bookbinding, March 28th and 29th, 1905.’

May created a detailed hand-stitched silk book pouch, from this sketch. The book pouch was designed to snugly fit inside it her father William Morris’ translation of the old French romance, ‘Amis and Amile’. Her pouch therefore features an image from the book it protects/enhances.

Hunt created three versions of this painting, this is the original, at @kebleoxford.bsky.social The second, painted shortly afterwards, can be seen in the Manchester Art Gallery. The third version in St Paul’s was painted around fifty years later, with the assistance of Edward Robert Hughes.

Merritt exhibited her work regularly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and the Paris Salon.

Initially a self-taught painter, Merritt later studied anatomy at the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia. After moving to Europe with her family in 1865, she took art lessons with various masters in Italy, Germany, and France.

🖼️ ‘Annunciation’, Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852–1936), 1900,
Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery.