2956885 Brunetta, 1882 (oil on canvas) by Grimshaw, John Atkinson (1836-93); 62.23x48.26 cm; Private Collection; (add.info.: This painting of 1882 is one of the first to feature the artist\'s model and muse, Agnes Leefe. She was a stage actress at the Leeds Grand Theatre whom Grimshaw invited to stay with his wife and family in their home, Knostrop Hall, in 1879. Although Grimshaw\'s grandson Guy Ragland Phillips insisted that their "association was only professional", the artist\'s daughter Elaine remembered that, "Poor Mama . . .was deeply hurt . . .Agnes Leefe remained, living in the studio, but having her dinner with us between 4 o\'clock and 5 and sleeping upstairs in a front attic bedroom.\' Leefe has been variously described as model, studio assistant, governess, even lady\'s companion. She was the sitter in many of his best figure subjects in his \'Aesthetic Movement\' manner, similar to that of Alma Tadema and Tissot. Grimshaw\'s working method, in landscape and in figure painting, could be described as developing \'variations on a theme\'; it was not a process of refinement, of sketches towards a finished picture, but one of invention and re-invention in different moods, with each successive version subtly different. Our painting is the prototype of four subsequent re-inventions. A year later, Grimshaw painted Fiammetta, a very similar composition of the same size (now in Bradford Art Galleries, Cartwright Hall). In the same year he painted another, smaller version that he called Lauretta (like Fiametta, a name from Boccaccio), and in 1885 he exhibited a fourth version, A Vestal, the largest yet at 24 x 20", and his only picture to be shown at the Grosvenor Gallery. Jane Sellars in Atkinson Grimshaw: Painter of Moonlight, 2011 wrote of the second version: "Fiametta" is the title of a poem by the fourteenth-century Italian writer, Giovanni Boccaccio, author of The Decameron, and it was the name he gave to the woman he loved but never married, Maria Aquino. In his writings, he alludes to Fiametta as being as cold as a marble statue, which no fire can ever warm. Agnes Leefe, posing as the object of unrequited love, is shown here in front of a marble frieze with classical figures and trailing ivy. She also wears a garland of ivy in her curly dark hair. Ivy represents fidelity, wedded love and friendship, and the ivy leaf can be a female symbol, denoting a force in need of protection. In the Victorian period, ivy was often used to symbolize the notion of gendered spheres for men and women, where the ivy signifies woman, who needs the sturdy oak. or man, for support." (p. 64)); Photo 穢 The Maas Gallery, London.