The Beloved (also The Bride) is an oil painting on canvas by the English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), now in Tate Britain, London.

The bride, caught in the action of moving back her veil, is attended by four virginal bridesmaids and an African page, who contrasts strikingly with the red hair and pale skin of the bride, and the varying shades of brunette hair and skin tones of the four bridesmaids.

[5] These grew "larger and more luxurious" in the next decade,[3] and included Bocca Baciata, Venus Verticordia, Beata Beatrix, The Blue Bower, Monna Vanna, Regina Cordium, and Lady Lilith.

[6] But these were all rather tightly framed pictures of a single figure, "in confined layers of space", with varying props and background, reflecting a variety of historical periods.

[7] It is generally agreed that Rossetti set out to show a range of skin colours within the figures, but the identification and interpretation of these varies greatly.

At that stage, the broad composition seems to have been the same as in the final work, but the subject was intended to be Dante's Beatrice, as imagined in the poet's Il Purgatorio.

After a month or two's work in the summer of 1863, the subject was changed to illustrate the Song of Solomon from the Bible, apparently because Rossetti found the complexion of his chosen model for the main figure at that point, Marie Ford, "too bright for his conception of Dante's Beatrice".

In March 1865 Rossetti painted a "Japanese" dress over the main figure, and replaced the previous female black ("mulatto" according to art historians) child with a male one, preferring his darker skin tone .

In the biography the painting is praised highly: The same elements, energy, a sympathetic and poetic scheme of colour, and composition of a fine order, combined with far greater force and originality in "The Bride", or "The Beloved", that magnificent illustration of The Song of Solomon.

The last named is a life-size group of powerfully coloured and diversely beautiful damsels accompanying their mistress with music and with song on her way to the bridegroom.

This picture, as regards its brilliance, finish, the charms of four lovely faces and the splendour of its lighting, occupies a great place 'in the highest grade of modern art of all the world.

Between conventional small mouldings, the widest zone of the gilded wood frame has a vegetal scroll of "wavy fronds" on a dotted background, with four raised roundels with a geometrical design, each midway along a side.

[23] However, recently some art historians have suggested that the painting's positioning of the models depicts the central woman as more beautiful.

[24] But another recent art historian claims (because of her red hair) that the bride is presented as an "Irish exotic Other", also claiming that Rossetti "demonstrated a fetishistic fixation on skin color and race",[25] and that her position as a bride "can be seen as a representation of anxiety of the increasing presence of [Irish] foreign immigrants in Great Britain.

A variety of interpretations of the standard of beauty and the black child has caused debates about Rossetti and this painting's relationship to racism.

She was used as a model by several artists, whose depictions of her striking features varied her skin tones to suit their subjects; she was painted as the mother of Moses, and as an African slave.