The next great subject in point of date, namely _Proserpine_, has a complicated history attached to it. Rossetti began the picture upon canvas four times in 1872, with ill-success. He took it up again in 1873 and painted a fine version which was spoilt in straining. This was replaced in the same year by a second fine one which arrived at its destination damaged by an accident in transit. A third large picture had therefore to be painted in 1874, which still exists, and finally the damaged picture was patched and partially repainted in 1877, which is the date it bears in the corner. This is the finest and best known version, and is the one of which an autotype reproduction has been published. There are sundry other replicas and crayon studies of the subject which have not been mentioned, but of the earlier attempts nothing now seems to be left in the form of pictures, the canvases having been cut down into the form of single heads. In all these pictures the subject is the same. The ravished bride of Pluto is seen standing in a corridor of Hades, lighted by a bluish subterranean light, and holding in one hand the pomegranate of which she ate one fatal seed that bound her for ever to her destiny. In none of the pictures done from Mrs. Morris do we find so appropriate the distant air of melancholy with which the painter contrived to invest her features. Of the other pictures painted at Kelmscott perhaps the most successful is _Veronica Veronese_, supposed to be taken from a passage in the letters of Girolamo Ridolfi, which describes how a lady, after listening to the notes of a bird, tries to commit them to paper, and finally to reproduce them on her violin. In the picture the Lady Veronica is robed in a rich gown of Rossetti's favourite green, with yellow daffodils in a glass beside her. The bird, a canary, is perched on a cage above her. She sits at a cabinet, on which is a sheet with the musical notes she has been writing down; and listening with dreamy blue eyes to the bird's song she lets her thumb wander over the strings of the violin suspended on the wall before her. Before leaving the year 1872 there is a minor but interesting episode to record. In this year Rossetti took up an old background of trees and foliage which he had painted in 1850, in his Pre-Raphaelite days, when studying with Holman Hunt at Knole Park, near Sevenoaks. Nothing had ever been done to it since; but now Rossetti painted in two women playing instruments and a group of dancing figures, for which very charming crayon studies were made, and called it _The Bower Meadow_. This interesting combination of early and late styles now belongs to Sir J. D. Milburn, of Newcastle.