The following 18 sheets of card, each measuring 530 x 365mm, is one of a small group of almost identical sets compiled and captioned by DGR in the winter of 1866-67, when he gave a set to Charles Augustus Howell with an inscribed title page reading "Photographs from designs and sketches by Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti given to Charles A. Howell by his friend D. G. Rossetti 18 January 1867." This was later acquired by C. Fairfax Murray and given to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, in 1916.

Marsh 1989 writes specifically about this portfolio: "[DGR] did succeed, however, in recording a large part of Elizabeth's work as an artist. In 1866 he arranged for her surviving drawings and sketches to be photographed, printed and pasted into folio volumes as a memorial of her art. At least four of these portfolios were compiled and distributed to friends; some survive, complete or in bits, others may have disappeared over the years. The glass negatives for the photographs were preserved, apparently by chance, since little value seems to have been placed on them, but most have never been reprinted. Into the portfolios were pasted two drawings by Rossetti himself, to represent the artist in the absence of a portrait photograph" (p. 13). Marsh further notes that she knows of only two such portfolios, that in the Fitzwilliam and one in the Ashmolean (where the glass negatives are also held).

Close comparison with the Howell-Murray set (now bound as an album) at the Fitzwilliam shows the present set to almost identical, bar a few accidental variants inevitable in such compilations: it is likewise on 18 sheets of the same size card, and has the same captions and same arrangement in all by a very few particulars. The set at the Ashmolean, bequeathed by John Bryson in 1967, although not substantially different in content, is differently arranged and lacks a few of the photographs present here. There are 15 sheets of card, without the portrait drawings and without two of the photographs on sheet 4, one on sheet 8, and two on sheet 13. The card size is the same, however, and it may be that this represents a first attempt to make a record of Siddal's drawings.

The Bryson set also has no title page, but it is accompanied by a further group of mounted photographs, not so numerous and on larger card, which carry notes on the verso in the hand of WMR. Given that the glass negatives came with the set, it seems very possible that this is DGR's own set of the portfolio, inherited by WMR (the family archivist) on his death.

Besides the copy given to Howell, one was sent to William Allingham, who recorded its arrival in his Diary for 9 November 1866: "On my return find a parcel by rail from Gabriel containing a portfolio of photographs from drawings by his poor wife; they are naturally full of his influence. Also of two very beautiful pencil portraits of her by his hand, one a head, the other full-length. Short, sad and strange her life; it must have seemed to her like a troubled dream. She was sweet, gentle, and kindly, and sympathetic to art and poetry. As to art-power, it is not easy to make as much as a guess; and the portfolio hardly helps. But it is very interesting, at least to those who knew her. Her pale face, abundant red hair, and long thin limbs were strange and affecting -- never beautiful to my eyes" (Allingham 1907, p. 144). A footnote states that the portfolio was then still in the possession of Allingham's widow Helen.

Marsh 1991 comments that one may have been sent to Swinburne, too, but there is no trace of that copy, nor are the present whereabouts of the Allingham set known.

It seems clear from the context that this set, although without a title page like that in the Howell-Murray set, must have been given by DGR to Henry and Emily Virtue Tebbs, probably at the same time. The captions and the photographs here are, with a very few exceptions, exactly the same -- the only variants are those which are likely to be found in such copies -- and I assume that these two sets, at least, were made at the same time.

It is clear that only a very small number of copies were made, each personally compiled and annotated by D.G. Rossetti himself, in the winter of 1866-67. When he was seeking to reunite her watercolors in 1869, he wrote to Charles Eliot Norton sending him a photograph of Pippa Passes (see sheet nos. 2 and 19), and commenting "I have had all her scraps and scrawls in ink photographed" (WMR, Rossetti Papers 1862-1870, 1907, p. 437). (Presumably in this he was including all the pencil drawings as well.) Copies of the Portfolio are of importance because they record a number of drawings by EES which have since been lost, but they are also of significance as a memorial to Rossetti's love for his dead wife -- one of the great artistic tragedies of the 19th century.