‘Two young men, projects of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, have recently come up to town from Oxford, and are now very intimate friends of mine. Their names are Morris and Jones. They have turned artists instead of taking up any other career to which the university generally leads, and both are men of real genius. Jones’s designs are marvels of finish and imaginative detail, unequalled by anything unless perhaps Albert Durer’s finest works.’

That summer Morris and Rossetti visited Oxford, being given the commission to paint the upper walls of the Oxford Union’s debating-hall with scenes from Le Morte d’Arthur and to decorate the roof between the open timbers. A roster of young painters were recruited to help complete the project along with two local models, Bessie and Jane Burden, the latter would go on to marry Morris in 1859, before becoming Rossetti’s muse and mistress.

The present drawing dates from this febrile, productive moment, when Rossetti, Morris and Burne-Jones were collaborating on the decoration of the Oxford Union. Rossetti had begun to prepare the elaborate composition of Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee in 1853 but the densely worked drawing was not finished until 1859, at which point Rossetti decided to use Burne-Jones as the model for the profile portrait of Christ. The scene depicted was described in detail by Rossetti himself: ‘two houses opposite each other, one that of Simon the Pharisee, where Christ and Simon, with other guests, are seated at table. In the opposite house a great banquet is held, and feasters are trooping to it dressed in cloth of gold and crowned with flowers… Mary Magdalene… has been in the procession, but suddenly turned aside at the sight of Christ, and is pressing forward up the stairs to Simon’s house.’[1] Rossetti had already persuaded the actress Ruth Herbert to sit for the figure of Mary Magdalene writing to William Bell Scott that she: ‘has the most varied and highest expression I ever saw in a woman’s face, besides abundant beauty, golden hair, etc. Did you ever see her? O my eye! She has sat to me now and will sit to me for Mary Magdalene.’[2] Rossetti’s careful, expressive portrait study of Ruth Herbert survives in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Rossetti evidently decided the youthful, intense and bearded features of Burne-Jones provided the ideal model for Christ. The present assured profile portrait drawing was undoubtedly made from life, Surtees quotes a letter from the novelist George Meredith stating that the architect Philip Webb had actually seen Burne-Jones sit for the drawing.[3] In the finished work, Christ is shown through a window, essentially separated from Mary Magdalene and other revellers. Rossetti relies on the profile design to impart both Christ’s humanity and sympathy, as Rossetti himself explained: ‘Christ looks towards her from within, waiting till she shall reach him.’ The finished drawing was much admired by John Ruskin who was eager to exchange it for a work of St Catherine, which he had already bespoken. He wrote to Rossetti: ‘The Magdalene is magnificent to my mind, in every possible way: it stays by me.’

The present beautifully modelled drawing demonstrates Rossetti’s mastery at observation, whilst the clarity of the line helped enshrine Burne-Jones’s features as a Pre-Raphaelite archetype of Christ. Rossetti would return to this drawing for the design for a stained glass window of The Sermon on the Mount, again using Burne-Jones as the model for Christ.[4]