Unlike the majority of Rossetti's work of the 1850s, which were small-scale drawings and watercolours characterised by medieval and early Renaissance revivalism,
Found was Rossetti's only attempt at a contemporary subject, prostitution, that was done in oils. Rossetti had addressed the topic of prostitution as early as 1847 in letters to his friend
William Bell Scott, who wrote the poem
Rosabell in 1846 (later known as
Maryanne) on the topic.
The Gate of Memory, a drawing Rossetti made c. 1854, shows a scene from
Rosabell where a prostitute is beginning her evening of work, and views a group of innocent girls "still at play" dancing. The drawing may have been intended to illustrate the poem in a book, but was painted as a larger watercolour in 1857, which was repainted in 1864. In 1870 Rossetti published a sympathetic poem about a prostitute,
Jenny. The artist
Alexander Munro's maid Ellen Frazer may have posed for an early head-study for the fallen country girl of
Found, and an ink-and-wash study of the composition (now in the
British Museum) is dated 1853. Rossetti began work on the painting in the autumn of 1854; this is probably the unfinished version now in Carlisle. The calf's role in the painting is two-fold. First, it explains why the farmer has come to the city. But more importantly, its situation as "an innocent animal trapped and on its way to be sold" parallels the woman's and raises questions on the woman's state of mind. "Is the prostitute rejecting salvation or is she accepting it; or is she repentant but unable to escape her fate, like the calf?" In 1855, Rossetti described his work-in-progress in a letter to
William Holman Hunt: The motto from
Jeremiah 2:2 reads "I remember Thee; the kindness of thy youth, the love of thy betrothal." and appears on two early compositional studies. Rossetti replaced the word "espousal" in the motto as he found it with "betrothal", which he felt better translated the sense of the original Hebrew. A version in oils was commissioned in 1859 by James Leathart, and this version, with the face of Fanny Cornforth, is the painting now in the Delaware Art Museum. Rossetti struggled with
Found, abandoning and returning to it intermittently until at least 1881, and leaving it unfinished at his death. His assistants
Henry Treffry Dunn and
Frederic Shields both helped with the painting, and Dunn and
Edward Burne-Jones may have worked on it after Rossetti's death. Rossetti published a poem, also titled "Found", as a companion to the painting in 1881 in the volume
Ballads and Sonnets. ==Studies==