Love's Greeting

Love's Greeting of 1861, held at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, belongs to the productive early 1860s phase when Rossetti was working primarily in small-format oil on panel — a technique he adopted from his study of Van Eyck and the Flemish Primitives. The subject of love's greeting — the charged moment of encounter or salutation between lovers — allowed Rossetti to combine his interest in symbolic figure painting with the intimate, jewel-like quality he associated with early Netherlandish art. The Gardner Museum's collection, assembled with a particular taste for works combining formal beauty with emotional intensity, provides an ideal institutional context for this kind of intimate Rossetti. Small panel works of this period show him at his most technically refined, working slowly over prepared grounds to achieve the luminous surface quality he admired in the Flemish masters.

The panel support, preferred by Rossetti in this period for its smooth, stable surface, allows for precise detail and rich color saturation. Thin oil glazes over a light ground create luminosity; Rossetti builds forms through careful layering rather than direct impasto.