Details + Condition: Hand-signed and framed 19th-century lithograph titled, "The Pot of Basil" or "Isabella", by the famous Art Nouveau artist, John W. Alexander (1856-1915). It features an Art Nouveau woman, Isabella, lovingly caressing a clay pot which holds the head of her dead lover. Pencil-signed by Alexander in the lower right corner, and also titled in pencil on the lower left. The lithograph is mounted in the original lovely carved antique frame. Measures: 10" x 14" (sight) and 15.5" x 19.5" (framed). In very good condition, with no visible damage. Please see below, for more information on this famous work.

"Isabella, or The Pot of Basil" was a poem written in 1820 by the English poet John Keats, who borrowed his narrative from the Italian Renaissance poet Giovanni Boccaccio. Isabella was a Florentine merchant’s beautiful daughter whose ambitious brothers disapproved of her romance with the handsome but humbly born Lorenzo, their father’s business manager. The brothers murdered Lorenzo and told their sister that he had traveled abroad. The distraught Isabella began to decline, wasting away from grief and sadness. She saw the crime in a dream and then went to find her lover’s body in the forest. Taking Lorenzo’s head, she bathed it with her tears and finally hid it in a pot in which she planted sweet basil, a plant associated with lovers. [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]

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