Isabella and the Pot of Basil

Isabella and the Pot of Basil
Artist	William Holman Hunt
Year	1868
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	187 cm × 116 cm (74 in × 46 in)
Location	Laing Art Gallery[1], Newcastle upon Tyne

Isabella and the Pot of Basil is a painting completed in 1868 by the English artist William Holman Hunt depicting a scene from John Keats's poem Isabella, or the Pot of Basil. It depicts the heroine Isabella caressing the basil pot in which she had buried the severed head of her murdered lover Lorenzo.

Hunt had drawn an illustration of the poem in 1848, shortly after the foundation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Still, he had not developed it into a completed painting. The drawing portrayed a very different scene, depicting Lorenzo as a clerk at work while Isabella's brothers study their accounts and order around underlings.

Shortly after his marriage, Hunt returned to the poem in 1866, when he began to paint several erotically charged subjects. His sensuous painting Il Dolce Far Niente (roughly translated: the sweetness of doing nothing) had sold quickly, and he conceived the idea for a new work depicting Isabella.^[2][3] Having travelled with his pregnant wife Fanny to Italy, Hunt began work on the painting in Florence.^[4] However, after giving birth, Fanny died from fever in December 1866. Hunt turned the painting into a memorial to his wife, using her features for Isabella. He worked on it steadily in the months after her death, returning to England in 1867, and finally completing it in January 1868. The painting was purchased and exhibited by the dealer Ernest Gambart.