Delaware Art Museum

I received an email from Margaretta Frederick, the curator of the Delaware Art Museum. Amazingly, this Museum in Delaware holds one of the most important collections of British Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the USA! She has invited me to come and look at them when I go to Delaware in November. Other galleries in the States which hold Pre-Raphaelite paintings are: Baltimore Museum of Art; Harvard University Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Walters Art Museum Baltimore and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The Delaware Collection includes Dante Gabriel Rossetti's WATER WILLOW (© Delaware Art Museum, Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial), painting of Jane, which is one of the paintings to have influenced our duet between Janey and Topsy (William Morris) called Upstream. In the background of this painting you can clearly see Kelmscott Manor, where the lovers spent their summers together, in the old house Morris and Rossetti rented together. William Morris also loved the River Thames and met Janey in Oxford, while he was working with Rossetti on the Arthurian murals for the Oxford Union. He later bought a house by the Thames, in London which he also called Kelmscott.

A verse from Topsy's part in the duet Upstream:

I dream
So many colours now.
Azure, green and yellow ochre,
Prussian blue and golden amber.
I will weave your willow water,
Where I met your river daughter.
How I loved the gleaming shadow,
Merton Field and Christchurch Meadow.
Upstream,
Where my inspiration lies.
Golden amber, silver water,
Flowing from your river daughter.