Purchased from David Croal Thomson, 1927 After Rossetti suffered a breakdown in June 1872 and took an overdose of laudanum, he was taken to Scotland to recuperate at houses belonging to his patron, Glasgow MP William Graham (1816-1885). In September he went to Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, the house which he part owned with William Morris. Although Morris stayed away, his daughters and his wife Jane - with whom Rossetti was in love - were there, while among the visiting friends and models was Alexa Wilding who arrived towards the end of June 1873 to sit for La Ghirlandata. At the top of the picture, the two angel heads were painted from Jane Morris's ten year old daughter May. La Ghirlandata is one of several paintings of women playing musical instruments painted by Rossetti between 1871 and 1874 which loosely celebrate music or lyric poetry.

His intense use of colour creates a brooding pictorial mood, while the picture's symbolism - although unclear - may reflect Rossetti's unhappy mental condition at this time. In an article in the Art Journal in 1884 his brother William Michael Rossetti claimed that he had intended 'a fateful or deathly purport' through the dark blue flowers in the foreground, which were supposed to be the poisonous monkshood - although, 'being assuredly far the reverse of a botanist', Rossetti painted its harmless relative larkspur by mistake.