Elizabeth (Lizzie) Siddal 1829 – 1862
(Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall also known as Lizzie Siddall also spelt Siddal, E E Siddal) (married name Rossetti).
Artists’ model, artist, poet.
25 July 1829 – 11 February 1862
Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall: A Tribute by Serena Trowbridge
Elizabeth Siddall is instantly recognisable as the face of early Pre-Raphaelitism and the primary muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She was an ambitious artist and poet as well as an artist’s model though her work was cut short by her early death at the age of 32.
Siddall was the daughter of a Sheffield cutler, who moved to London to pursue his business. Born in Hatton Gardens, the family moved to Southwark in 1831 and Siddall later worked for a milliner in Cranbourn Alley (off Leicester Square). She was interested in art and poetry from a young age, however, and there is an apocryphal tale of her reading Tennyson from a scrap of newspaper wrapping butter. During her time at the milliner’s she met Walter Deverell, an associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, recently formed in 1848 at the house of John Everett Millais, 83 Gower Street (now number 7). It is likely that she had contacted Deverell’s father, who worked at the Government School of Design based in Somerset House in order to show him her drawings. Deverell introduced her to the Brotherhood, describing her as a ‘Stunner’ and between 1849 and 1851 she modelled for Deverell, William Holman Hunt and Rossetti.
In 1851, Millais asked her to pose for his painting Ophelia, which has become emblematic of Siddall’s life. He chose to depict Ophelia, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in Act IV. vii, where Ophelia has been driven mad and runs to the stream where she drowns. Millais painted the incredibly detailed background of the scene – the river and banks, complete with flowers and water-weeds – in Ewell, Surrey. When the time came to include the figure of the drowned Ophelia, Siddall posed for Millais in his studio at Gower Street, a process which took over four months. The Pre-Raphaelites were interested in painting from life and making their work as realistic as possible and so Millais had sourced an old (possibly Elizabethan) dress and had a large bathtub moved into the studio. Thoughtfully, he had lit lamps placed underneath the tub to keep the water warm for his model. His son later recalled:
One day, just as the picture was nearly finished, the lamps went out unnoticed by the artist, who was so intensely absorbed in his work that he thought of nothing else, and the poor lady was kept floating in the cold water till she was quite benumbed. She herself never complained of this, but the result was that she contracted a severe cold, and her father (an auctioneer at Oxford) wrote to Millais, threatening him with an action for £50 damages for his carelessness. Eventually the matter was satisfactorily compromised. Millais paid the doctor’s bill; and Miss Siddal, quickly recovering, was none the worse for her cold bath.
This illness combined with her later ailments, began a train of myth-making about Siddall’s poor health. The romantic aspect of it pairs the fanatical male artist lost in his work with the poor, feeble beautiful woman who is mad (like Ophelia) and corpselike, passive in the extreme. This image of Siddall as a martyr to men’s art continues but it is not the whole story. The painting was completed in 1852 and was fairly well received. Over time it has become one of the most iconic images of Pre-Raphaelitism and, according to Tate Britain, is one of the most popular paintings in its collection today.
From 1852 Siddall’s relationship with Rossetti developed and she modelled almost exclusively for him. He also began to tutor her in drawing and painting and suggested that she change her surname to ‘Siddal’, considering it more ‘genteel’. By 1854, Siddall was thoroughly integrated into the Pre-Raphaelite circle; it was understood that she and Rossetti would marry at some point and she had been introduced to his sister, Christina, a poet, who may have provided a female poetic role model for Siddall. Much of her time was spent at Cheyne Walk with Rossetti and in 1855 the critic John Ruskin, a supporter of the Pre-Raphaelites, began to pay an annuity of £150 a year to Siddall to support her development as an artist. Ruskin considered her at least as promising an artist as Rossetti and bought her paintings and encouraged her to study the technicalities of drawing. Despite ill-health, she was productive, inspired by Rossetti’s work but quickly developing her own style, though she soon found Ruskin’s patronage limiting, and the arrangement ended after two years. However, she benefited from the possibility of studying apart from Rossetti, from travelling in France and from having the money to buy her own art materials.
Siddall’s paintings are almost all literary, inspired by Shakespeare, Keats, Tennyson, Sir Walter Scott, Browning and also ballads; she has a deceptively simple style which often centres female figures at a moment of crisis in the source text. For example, while Keats’ ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ was a popular inspiration for the male Pre-Raphaelite painters, Siddall chose instead in 1854 to depict Tennyson’s ‘St Agnes’ Eve’, shifting the focus away from the voyeuristic nature of Keats’ work, since Tennyson’s poem depicts a nun reflecting on the saint. There were plans for her work to appear in illustrated volumes of poetry, which were hampered by her poor health but, in 1857, the Brotherhood organised an exhibition at Russell Place, to which Siddall contributed six works – more than any other exhibitor except Rossetti. Though a small exhibition, the Pre-Raphaelites’ reputation was growing and it attracted considerable attention. This debut was well-received and one painting, Clerk Saunders, sold to an American collector. Throughout her life she produced more than 100 works on paper, in a style unmistakeably her own.
A recurring trope of her poetry is the depiction of women’s emotions, often women alone, without other figures or an implied male viewer. She did not share her writing with anyone other than, possibly, Rossetti and as far as we know she never attempted to publish; consequently, we have no dates for any of the poems. Yet the manuscripts demonstrate that she edited them, produced fair copies, changed words and stanzas around and demonstrated an understanding of poetic tropes and techniques. Though there has been a tendency for her poems to be read as autobiographical, in fact they often seem to relate to the literary sources which also inspired her painting. Many follow a ballad form and utilise the language of this genre; they are often melancholy, though probably not more so than most women’s writing of the time, exploring the difficulties of women’s lives such as the fickleness of men. Poems such as I care not for my Lady’s soul indicate that Siddall is aware of the conventions of love poetry and of the Petrarchan worship of the beloved and is quite prepared to undermine this and point out the hollowness of such sentiments.
After a long period of uncertainty, Siddall married Rossetti in Hastings, following a severe decline in health. However, in 1861 Siddall, by now addicted to the laudanum with which she had been medicated, suffered a still-birth, followed by a miscarriage later that year. Her relationship strained and health poor, she died at home in Chatham Place in 1862 of an overdose of laudanum, possibly accidental. The mythologising then began in earnest; in 1864 Rossetti begun his painting of Beata Beatrix, in which he immortalised Siddall as Beatrice to his Dante, forever silent and near death in a pose of suffering rapture. In 1869, her grave in Highgate Cemetery was opened up (with permission from the Home Secretary) for the retrieval of the manuscript of poems which Rossetti had cast into her coffin in despair.
Siddall’s roles as artist, poet and muse are inextricably linked with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but she positioned herself as a professional artist in a climate not always supportive to women’s work. The face of Ophelia still remains better-known than her own creative work and the dramatic stories of misadventure in a Bloomsbury bathtub, addiction, a turbulent relationship and potential suicide – not to mention exhumation – have over time clouded the picture of a woman who was an artist and a poet. Even her name is subject to debate; not only was her surname altered, but she is still referred to as Lizzie, Mrs Rossetti, ‘Guggums’ or The Sid (Rossetti’s names for her), and her work is frequently overshadowed by that of her husband, despite a growing body of critical work on the subject since the 1980s. Her work continues to be re-evaluated, as does her life; new facts are coming to light about her as she remains a figure of particular interest.
Further Reading
Hassett, Constance, “Elizabeth Siddal’s Poetry: A Problem and Some Suggestions”, Victorian Poetry, 1997, 35.4, 443-470
Hunt, Violet, The Wife of Rossetti Her Life and Death (London: John Lane, 1932)
Lewis, Roger C. and Mark Samuels Lasner, Poems and Drawings of Elizabeth Siddal (Wolfville, N.S.: Wombat Press, 1978)
Marsh, Jan, Elizabeth Siddal 1829-1862: Pre-Raphaelite Artist (Sheffield: Ruskin Gallery, Collection of the Guild of St George/Sheffield Arts Department, 1991)
—, Elizabeth Siddal, her Story (London: Pallas Athene, 2023)
—, The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (London: Quartet Books, 1989)
Millais, John Guille, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (London: Methuen, 1899)
Prettejohn, Elizabeth (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: CUP, 2012)
Trowbridge, Serena (ed.), My Ladys Soul: The Poems of Elizabeth Siddall (Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2018)
—, ‘Elizabeth Siddall’, Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, ed. Lisa Scholl (London: Palgrave, 2020)
—, ‘Elizabeth Siddall: Pre-Raphaelitism, Poetry, Prosody’ in Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics ed. Heather Bozant Witcher and Amy Kahrmann Huseby (London: Palgrave 2020)
Dr Serena Trowbridge is Reader in Victorian Literature at Birmingham City University. She specialises in Pre-Raphaelite women, and has edited the poems of Evelyn De Morgan and Elizabeth Siddall, and has published widely on Pre-Raphaelitism in literature, including Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Emma Sandys. She is Chair of the Pre-Raphaelite Society and Senior Vice-President of the Birmingham & Midland Institute.
MINI BIOGRAPHY
Education
School educated.
1852 Studied with Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
1857 Studied at the Sheffield School of Art.
Some Key Achievements and Interests
Was a model for Deverell (1849-50 Twelfth Night), Holman Hunt (Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary), Millais (1851-2 Ophelia), Rossetti (Regina Cordium).
1855-1857 John Ruskin subsidised her career as an artist paying for art works she produced.
Barbara Leigh Smith wrote to Bessie Parkes: ‘She [Siddal] is a genius and will (if she lives) be a great artist.’ (Hirsh, Pam; Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, London 1998; p50)
Explored medieval themes in her art, illustrated Walter Scott’s stories and ballads, and works by Tennyson, Keats and Browning.
1857 Exhibited at a Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at No 4 Russell Place, Fitzroy Square, London, the only woman to do so.
1890s Poems published posthumously by Siddal’s brother-in-law William Rossetti. However, he edited them. See Trowbridge, Serena for unedited versions.
Issues
Came from a working-class family and Rossetti was aware of his family’s disapproval of their relationship.
Had a short art training and lacked understanding of the human anatomy and practice in life drawing.
Suffered from depression and sickness, becoming addicted to laudanum.
Gave birth to a stillborn daughter and was left with post-partum depression.
Rossetti was unfaithful and her marriage an unhappy one.
1862 Overdosed on laudanum dying at the age of 32.
Connection to Bloomsbury
The Pre Raphaelite Circle: Millais lived at 83 Gower Street and it was here in 1848 the Brotherhood was formed. Rossetti lived and had a studio with Walter Deverell at 17 Red Lion Square in 1851.
Female networks
Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood, Morris & Co network including Christina Rossetti, Georgiana Burne Jones. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Bessie Rayner Parkes.
Works include
1853 The Lady of Shalott.
1853-4 Self Portrait.
1854-7 Clerk Saunders.
1854-7 Lady Clare.
1856 The Haunted Wood.
Poetry:
A Year and a Day
Recorded by Julia Pascal:
Slow days have passed that make a year,
Slow hours that make a day,
Since I could take my first dear love
And kiss him the old way;
Yet the green leaves touch me on the cheek,
Dear Christ, this month of May.
I lie among the tall green grass
That bends above my head
And covers up my wasted face
And folds me in its bed
Tenderly and lovingly
Like grass above the dead.
Dim phantoms of an unknown ill
Float through my tired brain;
The unformed visions of my life
Pass by in ghostly train;
Some pause to touch me on the cheek,
Some scatter tears like rain.
A shadow falls along the grass
And lingers at my feet;
A new face lies between my hands —
Dear Christ, if I could weep
Tears to shut out the summer leaves
When this new face I greet.
Still it is but the memory
Of something I have seen
In the dreamy summer weather
When the green leaves came between:
The shadow of my dear love’s face —
So far and strange it seems.
The river ever running down
Between its grassy bed,
The voices of a thousand birds
That clang above my head,
Shall bring to me a sadder dream
When this sad dream is dead.
A silence falls upon my heart
And hushes all its pain.
I stretch my hands in the long grass
And fall to sleep again,
There to lie empty of all love
Like beaten corn of grain.
Love and Hate
Recorded by Julia Pascal:
Ope not thy lips, thou foolish one,
Nor turn to me thy face;
The blasts of heaven shall strike thee down
Ere I will give thee grace.
Take thou thy shadow from my path,
Nor turn to me and pray;
The wild wild winds thy dirge may sing
Ere I will bid thee stay.
Turn thou away thy false dark eyes,
Nor gaze upon my face;
Great love I bore thee: now great hate
Sits grimly in its place.
All changes pass me like a dream,
I neither sing nor pray;
And thou art like the poisonous tree
That stole my life away.
(2018). Trowbridge, Serena (ed.). My Ladys Soul: The Poems of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall. Brighton, U.K: Victorian Secrets Limited. ISBN 978-1-906469-62-7. OCLC 1054934095.
Poems by Elizabeth Siddal – LizzieSiddal.com
Further reading