Fanny Cornforth

Fanny Cornforth (England, 1835 - 1909) was a model, lover and later housekeeper of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She matters to the history of painting because she was one of the most recognisable female figures in the Pre-Raphaelite circle and appears in dozens of the artist's works.

She is thought to have been born Sarah Cox in Steyning, West Sussex, the daughter of a blacksmith; the 1851 census records her working as a servant in Brighton. She met Rossetti in 1856 and became his model and lover. She first posed for the head of the main figure in Found. After Elizabeth Siddal's death in 1862 she moved into the household of the widowed Rossetti as his housekeeper, and remained with him until his death.

In Rossetti's paintings her figures tend to be more voluptuous than those of slimmer models such as Jane Morris or Elizabeth Siddal. She appears in at least sixty oils, watercolours, pastels and drawings, including Bocca Baciata, Lady Lilith and The Holy Grail. A small circular portrait of 1862, now at the Royal Academy in London, is probably an unusual direct likeness in the painter's output.

After leaving Rossetti's house in 1877 and marrying the publican John Schott in 1879, she ran the Rose Tavern with him in London, and in 1883 they opened the Rossetti Gallery to sell paintings she still held. Her last years were spent with her late husband's family in Sussex, and she died in 1909 in a psychiatric asylum.