On Sunday, 17th November 2019, whilst staying at the Caledonian Club for one of our regular weekends, I was able to pop in to the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition on 'Pre-Raphaelite Sisters'. I do not know much about Art, although all our walls here look like an Art Gallery! My two passions are for the Impressionists (to a lesser extent for Post Impressionist work) and the Pre-Raphaelites. I love the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery's collection; have visited the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool; and have been more than once to Tate Britain, including going to view its special exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde on Sunday, 28th October 2012.
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up...
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
Hamlet Act IV, Scene vii
The painting established Millais' reputation and made the model's face famous. In those days, I wasn't particularly interested in who the model was. It was only many years later, that I read
about Elizabeth 'Lizzie' Siddall, or Siddal depending on which book you read.
Lizzie had to lie in a large bath filled with water, kept at an even temperature by lamps underneath. On one occasion they went out; the artist, not noticing, painted on. Lizzie, benumbed, naturally caught a severe cold and Millais had to pay a doctor's fee.
The more I learned about Siddall, the more I was to understand the reason for the subtitle in Lucinda Hawksley's superb biography of Lizzie: The tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel. Apparently, 'discovered' in a Leicester Square hat shop, she first posed, in 1849, for Walter Deverell as Viola in his painting of Twelfth Night. In 1850, she was used by Holman Hunt as the model in A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Priest from the Persecution of the Druids; in 1852 came Millais' famous painting. Dante Gabriel Rossetti then pounced. An idealiser but also exploiter of young women, he was not only to paint her obsessively (Madox Brown said that when Rossetti first saw her he felt his destiny was defined.) but finally marry her in 1860. He did more than 60 paintings and drawings of her, notably Beata Beatrix.
Beata Beatrix
Tragically this was done from memory from 1864 onward, as she had died of an overdose of laudanum in February 1862. Rossetti placed some unpublished verses in her coffin; then regretted the decision and had them exhumed in a grisly night scene in October 1869. Tragedy even in the grave.
The other tragedy was that Lizzie was herself no mean artist herself and examples of her work have been in several of the permanent and temporary exhibitions I have been to - such as Before the Battle (late 1850s); Pippa Passing the Loose Women (c.1855); The Ladies' Lament (c.1857). Her work was mostly inspired by poetry, particularly the Ballads collected by Sir Walter Scott.
Before the Battle by Lizzie Siddall
Moreover, as I found out in my recent visit to the NPG, Siddall also tried her hand at poetry. I bought there My Ladys Soul: The Poems of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall. None of her friends or acquaintances mentioned her writings in her lifetime and, so far, only 16 poems and a few fragments are known about. Perhaps, not surprisingly, they tend to melancholy with a strong element of mediaevalism. One poem will suffice.
O grieve not with thy bitter tears
O grieve not with thy bitter tears
My life that passes so fast
the gates of heaven will open wide
and take me in at last
Then sit down meekly at my side
and watch my young life flee
Then solemn peace of holy death
Come quickly unto thee
But true love seek me in the throng
of spirits floating past
and I will take thee by the hands
and know thee mine at last
I much prefer Siddall's almost transparent look to the fleshy, pouting-lipped Fanny Cornforth, Annie Miller or Janey Morris. She fought and suffered for her art and fully deserves the posthumous praise from not only twenty-first century feminists, but also all right-thinking men.
R.I.P. Lizzie
Other books I hold are:
On Elizabeth Siddal[l]
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal (in Little Journeys to Homes of Great Lovers, July Vol.XIX No. 1, 1906)
The Golden Veil: A Novel based on the life of Elizabeth Siddall by Paddy Kitchen (Hamish Hamilton, 1981)
Lizzie Siddall: Her Journal [1862] by Gillian Allnutt (Greville Press Pamphlets, 1985)
The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal by Jan March (Quartet Books, 1989; pbk 1992)
Rossetti's Portraits of Elizabeth Siddal by Virginia Surtees (Ashmolean Museum, 1991)
Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel by Lucinda Hawksley (André Deutsch, 2004)
On Pre-Raphaelites generally
Rossetti by Lucien Pissarro (T.C. & E.C. Jack, n.d.)
The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy by William Gaunt (Jonathan Cape, 1942; reprint by Sphere Books, 1988)
The Pre-Raphaelites and their Circle by Richard Ormond (City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 1965; reprinted 1973)
The Pre-Raphaelites by Timothy Hilton (Thames and Hudson, 1970)
Pre-Raphelite Women by Jan Marsh (Phoenix Illustrated, 1987)
Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement by Jan Marsh & Pamela Gerrish Nunn (Virago, 1989)
Pre-Raphaelites re-viewed ed. Marcia Pointon (Manchester University Press, 1989)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Alicia Craig Faxon (Abbeville Press, 1989; new ed. 1994)
Pre-Raphaelite Art and Design by Raymond Watkinson (Trefoil Publications, 1990 2nd. ed.)
Oxford and the Pre-Raphaelites Jon Whiteley (Ashmolean Museum Oxford, 1993)
The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites by Edmund Swinglehurst (Parragon, 1994)
Pre-Raphaelite Drawings in the British Museum by J.A. Gere ((British Museum Press, 1994)
The Pre-Raphaelites and their World by William Michael Rossetti, The Folio Society, 1995)
Pre-Raphaelites by K.E. Sullivan (Brockhampton Press, 1996)
The Pre-Raphaelites: Inspiration from the Past by Terri Hardin (Smithmark, 1996)
Rossetti by David Rodgers (Phaidon Press, 1996; reprint 1998)
Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists by Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn (Thames and Hudson, 1997)
The Pre-Raphaelites by Tim Barringer (The Everyman Art Library, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998)
Essential Pre-Raphaelites by Lucinda Hawksley (Dempsey Parr, Parragon, 1999)
Millais by Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith (Tate Publishing, 2007)
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