"The Daydream", 1880

Her painting was a copy of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Daydream” on an end table for holding books and magazines, complete with a transcript of the poem he wrote for it trimmed in gold. She restored the book stand based on an advertisement she responded to in the paper, but refused in the end to sell it. She was surprised in the researching she did in order to find a subject how few of the library books containing works of art had any images reproduced in colour, but was struck by the Rossetti when she saw it nonetheless. Now if only her dress was aquamarine, she thought. Her first impression was of the difficulty. Within the week she saw a perfect reproduction of the painting in the window of an exclusive card store; the dress was indeed aquamarine. Despite the smallness of the image she converted it to scale and reproduced it successfully; there were nuances because of the tremendous size difference in the conversion. The real slip was that she’d unconsciously used her own jaw line rather than adhering to the model’s, inadvertently bringing it into harmony to the point where many people wondered if it was a self-portrait, so in a sense it was. She and the model, Jane Morris, had possessed a somewhat striking similarity to begin with (apart from eye colour), mainly due to possessing the same hair. She nearly lost the painting to a chemical reaction caused by the spray protector she used to go under the varnish, which was designed for acrylics. She’d done it for fear of how the varnish might react with the acrylic in order to insulate it from a product that was oil-based; that it nearly destroyed it upset her a great deal since in her mind despite saving it, the rendering was no longer perfect.The card: