Found (Rossetti)
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| Artist | Dante Gabriel Rossetti |
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| Year | 1854–55, 1859–81 |
| Medium | oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 91.4 cm × 80 cm (36.0 in × 31 in) |
| Location | Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware |
 Found by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Delaware Art Museum
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Found is an unfinished oil painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, now in the Delaware Art Museum. The painting is Rossetti's only treatment in oil of a contemporary moral subject, urban prostitution, and although the work remained incomplete at Rossetti's death in 1882, he always considered it one of his most important works, returning to it many times from the mid-1850s until the year before his death.
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.
On 30 September 1853 Rossetti wrote to his mother and sister describing the type of wall, cart and calf that he wished for them to find as models so that he could begin the painting. The unfinished Carlisle version consists only of these three elements, plus the head of Fanny Cornforth, apparently added later. Ford Madox Brown noted in his diary Rossetti's difficulties in painting the calf in November 1854, "he paints it in all like Albert Durer (sic) hair by hair & seems incapable of any breadth ... From want of habit I see nature bothers him—but it is sweetly drawn & felt."
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?"
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Wikipedia