Coarse-grained but good-natured and handsome in a voluptuous, worldly way, Fanny had met Rossetti by 1858. She was almost certainly his mistress before his marriage to Lizzie Siddal in May 1860, and on his move to Cheyne Walk following Lizzie's death two years later, she became his housekeeper. During the late 1850s and early 1860s she posed for many of his most important pictures, her type corresponding perfectly to the 'Venetian' tendency of his work at this period, just as Lizzie had represented his earlier 'Dantesque' phase. Virginia Surtees dates the present drawing to c. 1862-5