The story goes: William Morris fell in love with Jane Burden, who had been recruited by Rossetti as a model for the murals being painted in the Oxford Union building in 1857. Frustrated both by his artistic limitations and his burgeoning feelings for his model, Morris scribbled on the back of La Belle Iseult, ‘I cannot paint you but I love you.’ Despite its uncertain provenance (re-tellings typically begin with the phrase ‘Morris is said to have’), this anecdote serves an important purpose for Morris biographers as the founding moment of a relationship doomed from the start by mis-matched backgrounds, feelings and temperaments. Morris's scribble is seen as a confession on two levels: an acknowledgement of artistic failure (‘I cannot paint you’), borne out by the fact that La Belle Iseult was Morris's only known completed oil painting; and an expression of powerful emotion (‘but I love you’) that tragically implicates art and love in the Morris marriage from the outset.