Elizabeth Siddal – Pre-Raphaelite Model and Muse

Troubled Red-Haired Beauty Became an Art Icon

Sep 14, 2009

Though she was a poet and artist in her own right, Lizzie Siddal is best known as the idealized model of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

She wasn’t what most people in Victorian England would consider beautiful. She was tall and long-limbed, very thin, with large heavy-lidded eyes and a head of abundant, coppery red hair, which at the time still carryied the taint of witchcraft and ill-luck. Her once-proud family had fallen among the working classes, but she carried herself with the aloof elegance of a noblewoman. Her life might have followed the mundane course of so many young women of her station, if not for a chance encounter that would end up making hers one of the most recognized faces in art.

Elizabeth Siddal’s Early Life

She was born Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (she later dropped the second L at the suggestion of Dante Rossetti) in London on July 25, 1829. Her father Charles Crooke Siddall maintained the family had claims to nobility, but at the time of Lizzie’s birth her father was running a cutlery business; the neighborhoods where the family lived were barely on the edge of respectability. Lizzie never went to school, but was taught to read and write by her parents, and developed a love for poetry at a young age.

When she was twenty years old, she was working in a milliner’s shop. It was here she was first spotted by artist Walter Deverell, who was struck by Lizzie’s unusual looks, seeing in her a personification of a certain beauty ideal worshiped by the group of artists he associated with, who called themselves Pre-Raphaelites. After telling the other artists of his find and bringing his mother to the hat shop to ask Lizzie to pose for him (as posing for painters was considered only a notch above prostitution), he started Lizzie on the path that would lead to her extraordinary, though tragically short, life.

Lizzie Siddal and the Pre-Raphaelites

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) consisted of seven artists plus various hangers-on; they sought to return art to a stylized, Medieval ideal they felt had been lost in the naturalistic art following in the wake of Raphael. The PRB were inspired by the richly-colored art of the Middle Ages, by Shakespeare and Arthurian legends. Lizzie, with her strange beauty, became a touchstone in their idealization of the feminine, the first of their so-called “stunners.”

After posing for Deverell, she modeled for other members of the PRB, including William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, who would paint arguably the best-known image of her, the 1852 Ophelia. But it was her association with Dante Gabriel Rossetti that would become the stuff of legend.

Lizzie Siddal and Dante Rossetti

The romantic Rossetti was immediately taken with the regal, red-haired Lizzie; after painting her a few times, he insisted that none of the other members of the PRB could paint her again. The pair were inseparable; Rossetti apparently saw in Lizzie an incarnation of Beatrice, the sainted love of poet Dante Alighieri, while Lizzie loved the worship bestowed on her by the intense young man. Rossetti’s adoration for Lizzie bordered on the obsessive; his studio was wallpapered with sketches and paintings of her, and he even encouraged her own artistic ambitions, labeling her a creative genius.

He later arranged a fruitful patronage with art critic John Ruskin, who paid Lizzie £150 a year and bought most of her artwork. But Lizzie was depressive by nature, and her laudanum addiction didn’t help matters. Adding to her unhappiness was the fact that Rossetti, despite his obvious devotion, would not marry Lizzie, and carried on several affairs with other models.

Lizzie’s Illness and Death

Throughout her life, Lizzie was often in fragile health. Scholars have suspected everything from anorexia to gastroenteritis to psychosomatic disorder, though many symptoms were likely caused or exacerbated by the laudanum. She was often traveling to health spas around England and France to recuperate from bouts of illness. It was during one of these serious bouts in 1860, when she and Rossetti genuinely believed she was dying, that Rossetti finally made her his wife after ten years of promises.

She eventually recovered from that illness, but then became pregnant with a baby that died in the womb and was delivered stillborn. Lizzie never recovered from this tragedy, and though she became pregnant again, the possibility of losing another child was evidently too much for her. She overdosed on laudanum and died on February 11, 1862. Her death was ruled an accident, but evidence later came to light that Rossetti had found her suicide note, but burned it so Lizzie could receive a Christian burial.

The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal

Rossetti was inconsolable after Lizzie’s death; as she lay dead, he placed the only copy of a book of poems he had written in the coffin with her. Seven years later, when Rossetti himself was racked by madness and drug addiction, he became obsessed with retrieving the poems. His unscrupulous agent, Charles Howell, was able to secure permission to exhume the grave at Highgate Cemetery, though the deed was performed in the dead of night and without Rossetti present.

The exhumation episode became the root of a legend that still circulates about Lizzie, that inside her coffin her body had not decomposed, and that her bountiful red hair had continued to grow. However, this was likely just a tall tale that Howell told to Rossetti, in order to assuage the artist’s guilt at having defiled her grave.

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The copyright of the article Elizabeth Siddal – Pre-Raphaelite Model and Muse in 19th Century Art is owned by Jenny Ashford. Permission to republish Elizabeth Siddal – Pre-Raphaelite Model and Muse in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.