Victorian Visual Culture

If you have ever seen a Pre-Raphaelite painting, there’s a good chance you have encountered the face of Elizabeth Siddal. She is the model for John Everett Millais’s Ophelia and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix. She was married to Rossetti, served as his “”””muse””””,  and was a central figure in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Though she is best remembered for her striking features which adorn the aforementioned paintings, she was also a prolific poet herself. Sadly, the poetry she is most associated with was that of her husband, which was buried with her when she died.

Beata Beatrix (1864-70), Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Tate Gallery

Elizabeth Siddal was born to an upper middle class family in 1829 in London. Though she had no formal education, she nonetheless became a pivotal figure in the intellectual circle of Millais, Rossetti, and John William Waterhouse.

Ophelia (1851), John Everett Millais, Tate Gallery

I first encountered Siddal as the sitter for Millais’s Ophelia. In this painting, Siddal as Ophelia drifts along a river, captured right at the moment when her clothes are still helping her stay afloat before they become waterlogged and drag her below the surface. I was always disturbed by the depiction of Ophelia, in Shakespeare and later by Millais, as a pretty girl, even as she is about to die. In fact, Siddal was in danger of actually dying during the painting of this image. To pose as Ophelia, she lay floating in a bathtub as Millais painstakingly copied her likeness. The candles underneath the tub, which kept the water marginally warm, eventually blew out, leaving Siddal laying in rapidly cooling water in the middle of a London winter. She later caught pneumonia as a result of the ordeal. Both the painting and this anecdote lead me to the conception of this woman as a fragile, tragic figure.

While she was often painted, mostly by Rossetti, as varying folkloric and religious figures (Joan of Arc, Lady of Shalott, etc.), she ended up becoming a mythic figure in her own right. After her tragic death by suicide, her husband Rossetti was so distraught that he ordered all his poems be buried with her. Later, he realized this wasn’t such a great idea, and exhumed her coffin to retrieve his poetry. The legend goes that upon opening the coffin, her hair appeared to have grown after her death, filling the box with her distinctive red hair. Therefore, in death she takes on the kind of magical qualities associated with the women for whom she had served as a model.

What neither of these stories mention, however, is Elizabeth Siddal’s own artistic practice. By mythologizing her, and making her the victim of these two great artists, history has erased her personhood and agency. I highly recommend reading some of her poetry. They’re really lovely and brief, and help us to understand this woman as she was outside of the context of Millais and Rossetti: Alive, on dry land, and a woman who created her own works of art.

Sources:

Bradley, Laurel. “Elizabeth Siddal: Drawn into the Pre-Raphaelite Circle.” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol. 18, no. 2, 1992, pp. 137–187. JSTOR, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4101558.

Hassett, Constance W. “Elizabeth Siddal’s Poetry: A Problem and Some Suggestions.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 35, no. 4, 1997, pp. 443–470. JSTOR, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40002261.

“Siddal, Elizabeth Eleanor (1829–1862), Painter | Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.” (1892–1973), Writer and Philologist | Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 9 Nov. 2017, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-37957?docPos=1.