Of the Pre-Raphaelites, she had one of the longest-running careers, spanning sixty years and producing over one hundred and fifty works, including Love's Messenger and numerous romantic scenes from the Divine Comedy.

Though her work with the Brotherhood began as a favourite model, she soon trained and became a respected painter, earning praise from Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others.

Marie Stillman died in March 1927 in Ashburn Place in South Kensington, four days shy of her 83rd birthday, and was cremated at Brookwood Cemetery, near Woking, Surrey.

Beauty aside, Marie was very tall, and cut an imposing figure- in her later years dressing entirely in black- and purposefully attracting much attention throughout her life.

[3][6][7] In the house of the Greek businessman A.C. Ionides at Tulse Hill, in south London, Marie first met the artist James McNeill Whistler and playwright Algernon Charles Swinburne.

[4] Example of modeling works: Brown; Burne-Jones (The Mill); Julia Margaret Cameron; Rossetti (A Vision of Fiammetta, Dante's Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice, The Bower Meadow); and Spencer Stanhope.

For example, Robert de la Sizeranne of Le Correspondant noted that this new generation of Pre-Raphaelites, Marie Stillman among them, had enough in common with the Symbolists to be considered one.

[9] Marie Spartali Stillman, could be considered a candidate for Symbolism because her figures "... have an immobility, a silence, a pose almost suspended, a slow hesitation in their rare movements, which make them resemble something like sleepwalkers".

[8][9] In 1873 both her young daughter, Euphrosyne, and her sister Christina fell ill. Stillman wrote to Ford Madox Brown that she was preoccupied with their health and felt "too weak to paint."

[10] The plaque was installed in April 2023 at The Shrubbery, 2 Lavender Gardens, Clapham, her family home when she was a young woman and where she later painted and prepared for exhibitions.