Proserpine (also Proserpina or Persephone) is an oil painting on canvas by English artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painted in 1874 and now in Tate Britain. Rossetti began work on the painting in 1871 and painted at least eight separate versions, the last only completed in 1882, the year of his death.

In his Proserpine, the artist illustrates in his typical Pre-Raphaelite style the Roman goddess Proserpina who lives in the underworld during Winter. Although Rossetti inscribed the date 1874 on the picture, he worked for seven years on eight separate canvases before he finished with it. His Proserpine, like his model Jane Morris, is an exquisitely beautiful woman, with delicate facial features, slender hands, and flawlessly pale skin set off by her thick raven hair. Rossetti painted it at a time when his mental health was extremely precarious and his love for Jane Morris was at its most obsessive.

 Rossetti wrote about Proserpine

    She is represented in a gloomy corridor of her palace, with the fatal fruit in her hand. As she passes, a gleam strikes on the wall behind her from some inlet suddenly opened, and admitting for a moment the sight of the upper world; and she glances furtively towards it, immersed in thought. The incense-burner stands beside her as the attribute of a goddess. The ivy branch in the background may be taken as a symbol of clinging memory.

The inscribed sonnet

Rossetti's eighth and final version of Proserpine, now in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (1882)

On the top right of the canvas "Proserpina" is inscribed by the artist, followed by his sonnet in Italian. The same sonnet in English is inscribed on the frame:[7]

        Afar away the light that brings cold cheer

        Unto this wall, – one instant and no more

        Admitted at my distant palace-door

        Afar the flowers of Enna from this drear

        Dire fruit, which, tasted once, must thrall me here.

        Afar those skies from this Tartarean grey

        That chills me: and afar how far away,

        The nights that shall become the days that were.

        Afar from mine own self I seem, and wing

        Strange ways in thought, and listen for a sign:

        And still some heart unto some soul doth pine,

        (Whose sounds mine inner sense in fain to bring,

        Continually together murmuring) —

        'Woe me for thee, unhappy Proserpine'.

        — D. G. Rossetti