Remarkably, this archetypal, masterful, yet subtle pen and ink drawing was made by Rossetti when he was only 18, two years before the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed. Of the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti always felt inadequate in relation to the two young superstars at the Royal Academy Schools, Holman Hunt and Millais. In retrospect we can now see that it was Rossetti who was the most powerful artist on paper and one of the greatest of his generation. This drawing belonged to William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919), the artist's younger brother. It descended through his family until December 2010. The artist William Rothenstein, who painted William Michael's portrait (National Portrait Gallery, London) in 1909, recalled in his reminiscences, Men and Memories (1931), how his sitter's house in Primrose Hill, 3 St Edmund's Terrace, was full of paintings and drawings by Dante Gabriel and Ford Madox Brown ... he [also] had countless small drawings by his brother put away in drawers, which he would bring out from time to time. Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament is an illustration to a ballad in Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), which was an important source for both Rossetti and others of the Pre-Raphaelites. Described as a Scottish song, the ballad takes the form of a lament by Lady Anne, in which she and her child had been deserted by her husband. The style of the drawing and the form of the monogram indicate a date of c. 1846-7.
William Michael Rossetti; thence by descent to: Helen Rossetti Angelli; to her daughter: Mrs Imogen Dennis; by descent to 2010