Who painted the 1871 artwork Pandora, showing the mythological figure with a small box?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted the 1871 artwork Pandora, showing the mythological figure with a small box.

Rossetti was an English poet, painter, and founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His art often joined literary allusion, medieval imagery, and symbolic portraiture. Pandora belongs to this wider interest in women from myth and literature.

Rossetti's Pandora presents the figure as an intense, self-contained presence holding the container associated with the story. The work is less a literal narrative illustration than a symbolic image, using the object and the sitter's expression to evoke temptation, danger, and unknowable consequences.

The painting is sometimes confused with John William Waterhouse's Pandora of 1896. Both artists treated the same mythological subject, but they belonged to different generations of Victorian painting and produced distinct compositions. Rossetti's picture is also connected to the recurring Pre-Raphaelite practice of using mythic women as vehicles for emotional and symbolic themes.