Alfresco Annunciation

 

Way back in 2020 I wrote on the correct title for Elizabeth Siddal's watercolour known as 'Haunted Wood', 

when I drew attention to Rossetti's comparable rendering of the traditional Annunciation with Virgin Mary and Angel Gabriel also in an unusual outdoor setting.

Now I have seen a third contemporary version, by Burne-Jones, in the large and wonderful triptych currently loaned to  the Pre-Raphaelite Drawings exhibition at the Ashmolean.   The triptych is full of details and vignetters, of which this is one 

 :

Not easy to photograph and so a rather rough image.  Mary is not in a wood nor beside a stream but by the well in a walled  garden and the archangel is floating in through the garden door,  Mary's attitude is quite close to that in Siddal's image.  

It makes me wonder again if there is a prototype for an outdoor Annunciation - in 14th century painting, manuscript illumination or a medieval text.  Or is the notion a Pre-Raphaelite invention?