Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti, as this new book calls her in a break with convention, is better known by her maiden name: Elizabeth Siddal or Siddall (the spelling is uncertain, as is much else about her). The Pre-Raphaelite icon was familiar to the public as the model for John Everett Millais’s ‘Ophelia’ sinking to her watery grave and as the muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who eventually married her. Not long afterwards she died of an opiate overdose in 1862, aged 32.
Her early demise, echoing her association with Ophelia, left her ripe for myth-making, as first explored by Jan Marsh in her groundbreaking The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (1989). By the fin de siècle, the late Mrs Rossetti was a pin-up for the Decadent movement, a glamorised compound of beauty and death; in the 1920s, Violet Hunt’s biography plumbed a nadir of sensationalist fabrication; by the mid-20th century, Siddal had literally become a fictional character, featuring in novel after novel with fanciful titles ranging from Angel with Bright Hair (1957) to Pale as the Dead (2002).
It was only from the 1980s that serious attention gradually began to be paid to an aspect of Siddal that had previously been sidelined: the fact that she had been not just a model but an artist in her own right. Glenda Youde’s study, drawing on the work of Marsh and others, takes that scholarship further by offering detailed art-historical analysis to suggest that Siddal’s imaginative input was more central to the Pre-Raphaelite project than has previously been supposed.
Youde begins by sifting the facts from the fictions, noting how retellings of the ‘Lizzie Siddal’ narrative tend to reduce it to a few anecdotes, some based in reality, others not. That the young Siddal posed for Millais in a bathtub of water, and caught a chill as a result, is true. So is the story – macabre though it sounds – that Rossetti exhumed her corpse to retrieve the poetry manuscript he had buried with her (the scene was given the full gothic treatment by Ken Russell in his film Dante’s Inferno).
But the received view that Siddal was ‘discovered’ for her shimmering beauty while working in a bonnet shop turns out to be fanciful. In fact she was employed as a more upmarket private dressmaker and already had artistic aspirations when a client’s family turned out to include a Mr Deverell, who worked for the Government School of Design. She showed him ‘some outlines, designs of her own leisure hours’; he introduced her to his son, Walter, a young painter on the fringes of the emerging Pre-Raphaelite movement, for whom she posed as Viola in wrinkly tights in 1849.
Siddal seems to have first agreed to model as a way in to artistic circles. Early sittings – including as an Ancient Briton, courtesy of Holman Hunt – do not beautify her at all. But her persistence (including in the bathtub) paid off. Walter Deverell’s friend Rossetti eventually took her on as his pupil.
Her imaginative sketches often seem to look beyond their time to a post-naturalist, symbolist era
Their relationship soon became more intimate, not just emotionally but in terms of artistic give-and-take. Many of Rossetti’s sketches from the life show her in the act of drawing or painting. Her imaginative talent was moreover recognised by other men in their circle. Ruskin thought she had ‘genius’, standing patron to her to the tune of £150 p.a. She was the only woman represented in the PRB (Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) show of 1857.
More than 100 drawings by Siddal are known today, some only from photos, but her oeuvre nevertheless remains something of a conundrum, often disparaged as ‘naive’ or ‘primitive’. In terms of shading, modelling and perspective, she is certainly far less technically secure than her male confrères or than other contemporary female painters loosely connected to the PRB circle. These included Barbara Bodichon and Joanna Boyce, both of whom, unlike Siddal, received academic art school training. However, as Youde explains, it is a mistake to focus on her draughtsmanship, because that is not what her contemporaries valued her for. Rather, her ‘genius’ was to be found in what Dante Gabriel’s brother, William Rossetti, called her ‘fecundity of invention’: her original compositional and iconographic ideas.
The influence that her sketched designs went on to have on the developing Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, as it moved away from minute naturalism to something more stylised, can be best seen in her medievalist watercolour ‘Lady Clare’ (1854-57). With turned-down gaze, sinuous neck and luxuriant hair, the central female figure offers the first, embryonic pre-echo of what would eventually become the cliché of the Pre-Raphaelite feminine ideal, as seen later in Rossetti’s pictures of Jane Morris and in the work of Edward Burne-Jones.
If Siddal was a Pre-Raphaelite muse, Youde contends, it was in a practical rather than romantic way: as a source for subjects, often taken from literary sources, and for design ideas, such as contorted figure poses drawn from the imagination rather than the life school. We see how, years after her death, Rossetti returned to her sketches for inspiration. After she died, he also had all her drawings meticulously photographed and circulated in several albums among fellow artists, as is now documented in full detail for the first time. As late as the 1890s, the painter Frederick James Fields, who owned one of the albums, copied the pose for his figure of ‘Sister Helen’ from Siddal’s 1854 sketch of the same subject. Youde’s commitment to chasing up every minute lead in terms of possible artistic influence makes this book feel a little pedestrian and heavy on detail. But the build up of evidence she cites compels.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Rossetti née Siddal as a person remains a recessive and mysterious character. Indeed, her own brother-in-law felt that her conversation gave ‘little clue to her real self or to anything determinate’. This perhaps reflects the anomalousness and anxiety of her social position at a time when contortedly minute nuances of gender and class governed Victorian society. Other Pre-Raphaelite models were working-class mistresses, picked up on the street for their looks. She, in contrast (as has only belatedly emerged through the continuing research efforts of Jan Marsh), was lower-middle class, the daughter of a prosperous, upwardly mobile ironmonger.
Her venture into modelling must have been daringly unconventional for a woman from a socially aspirational background. It’s only too relevant that the story of ‘Lady Clare’, taken from Tennyson, is a dramatic one of secret low birth with more than a symbolic hint of imposter syndrome. Youde’s decision to call her subject by her married name may seem to some retrogressive. But the artist herself – whose on-off relationship with Rossetti dragged on for years before they tied the knot – would have regarded it as a sign of status and acceptance.
It was perhaps Siddal’s sense of not quite belonging that gave her work its ‘startling peculiarities’, to quote one Victorian critic. Her self-portrait, made in 1853, probably in the experimental combination of watercolour with pigment and gum, gives little away. Almost aggressively unglamorised, its hooded eyes, with the blond lashes of a redhead, stare out at the viewer warily with a sort of defensive boldness.
It makes a strange contrast with Rossetti’s lush and idealised posthumous oil painting of her as ‘Beata Beatrix’, swooning ecstatically at the moment of death, an opium poppy in her hand. The grand operatic excesses of the latter, with its sinuous neck and luscious hair, contrast poignantly with an earlier, domestically intimate, in-the-moment pen-and-ink drawing he made of Elizabeth leaning forward in concentration to sketch his own portrait as he sat with his feet on a chair.
We’ll never know whether Mrs Rossetti took her final laudanum fix by accident or design. At a time when the drug was the commonest over-the-counter painkiller, many were unacknowledged addicts and it was easy to up the dose too far by mistake, especially for someone who was depressed, as she had every reason to be at the time, having recently suffered a stillbirth.
She never painted the sort of masterpieces in oils that make reputations. But her imaginative sketches – odd, edgy, even cack-handed – often seem to look beyond their time to a post-naturalist, symbolist era. They turn out to have proved in their own way more significant to the Pre-Raphaelite legacy than her mythographers, in love with her passive victimhood, have usually tended to credit.
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