Artist Elizabeth Siddal: Portrait of a Pre-Raphaelite Muse

In England, in the year 1848, 7 avante garde artists that all shared a unique vision formed one of the greatest movements in art history known as the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, together with William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Thomas Woolner and F. G. Stephens all sought to breathe new life into the art form of painting.

The term "Pre-Raphaelite" is based upon the rejection of art that followed what they considered to be the mechanical approaches of Michelangelo and Raphael and those that followed closely in their footsteps, as was the tradition in their time to do. They deplored the teachings of the founder of the English Royal Academy of the Arts and chose to create a new approach to painting, one that paid closer attention to detail and was imbued with rich, vivid and fragrant colors.

The Pre-Raphaelites were heavily inspired by social critic John Ruskin's praise of the artist as prophet and much of their original work was inspired by his essays. The Pre-Raphaelites also believed that artists should work with and learn from one another and, as such, encouraged painters to write and writers to paint. To this end, much of their work was influenced by the writings of Tennyson, Browning, Shakespeare and Keats. Their intense fascination with medieval life and art is quite apparent in their work as is their deep and abiding love of Romanticism.

1849 was the year that first saw their paintings put on exhibition with the characteristic "PRB" flourish added to the bottom of each painting directly below each painter's name. Scandal was soon to come, however, when Millais exhibited his painting Christ in the House of His Parents, which was deemed blasphemous at the time. Charles Dickens himself commented that Millais had made the Holy Family "look like alcoholics and slum-dwellers." Regardless of the public criticism, however, John Ruskin publicly praised the Pre-Raphaelites for their new approach to art and continued to offer both his written and financial support.

The Pre-Raphaelites had strong ideas about what they considered to be feminine beauty and brought to fruition some of the most beautiful paintings of females known in the art world. One such female who personified all that they held dear was a young woman named Elizabeth Siddal. Elizabeth Siddal was born on July 25, 1829 and was the single most important and influential woman to sit for the Pre-Raphaelite painters.

Elizabeth sprang from a poor family with a father who was a Sheffield cutler, and was working as a milliner's assistant in 1850 in Leicester Square when she was discovered by Walter Deverell, who was searching for a model to sit for his painting Twelfth Night. With pale skin, full lips, deeply-veiled large blue eyes like pools of light and waist-length auburn hair, Deverell was immediately taken with her and exclaimed to William Holman Hunt that she was like some magnificent queen.

The first painting of Siddal that brought her to the public eye was painted by John Everett Millais wherein the young Elizabeth poses in a bathtub full of water as Ophelia. Millais purchased the dress she wore in the painting for the sum of 4 pounds and immediately a muse was born. This painting was not without its difficulties though as Millais was constantly putting oil lamps around the bathtub to keep the water heated. Siddal lay in the tub for many days while Millais worked on his masterpiece and so absorbed was he with his painting that at one point the water became unbearably cold for hours and Elizabeth suffered the consequences with a cold that was so severe it bordered on pneumonia.

Elizabeth was in much demand with the Pre-Raphaelites and next worked as a model for William Holman Hunt. But it was to Dante Gabriel Rossetti that she gave herself to fully and she has gone down in history as being his beloved muse. It's safe to say that once Rossetti discovered this extraordinary woman he wanted to keep her to himself and forbade her from sitting for any of his other Pre-Raphaelite brothers from that point forward.

In Dante Alighieri's books, The Divine Comedy, Dante is on a painful and torturous journey through Hell and Purgatory and is aided and helped along by Beatrice, his guide to eternal Paradise. Rossetti believed Elizabeth Siddal to be his own Beatrice, and painted a portrait of her as Alighieri's Beatrice as well as numerous other depictions of Dante's journey to Paradise with Elizabeth in the starring role.

Elizabeth soon became engaged to Rossetti and studied alongside him. She began writing poetry and painting her own portraits too. But what should have been a beautiful time in Elizabeth's life was marred by the fact that Rossetti kept putting off marrying her. He was concerned with his family's views of Elizabeth, who was not in the same social position as he, and this caused her much distress. His family didn't approve of the impending marriage and he broke off their engagement several times, which can't have been a nice thing for his sole muse.

In the mid 1850s Elizabeth was in poor health, probably due to high levels of stress, and John Ruskin grew concerned. He offered her a yearly salary in exchange for all the sketches and paintings she produced, but she had developed an unfortunate addiction to laudanum which consisted of opium sweetened with sugar and different alcohols.

On May 23, 1860, Elizabeth Siddal and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were finally wed in Hastings after much time apart. The union proved to be a tragic one however, as Rossetti had already begun sketching other women. In fits of rage, Siddal began tossing these sketches out the window and grew to be very jealous. After a time she became pregnant, but the child was stillborn and this threw Siddal into a deep depression from which she never recovered.

In February of 1862, after becoming pregnant for the second time, Siddal overdosed on laudanum and was found dead in her bed by Rossetti. He suffered much grief from this loss and took all of his poetry and buried it in Siddal's coffin at Highgate Cemetery. But in 1869 he became obsessed with retrieving his lost poems, and contacted the Home Secretary in an effort to exhume the body of Siddal so he could get his poetry back. Permission was given, and in the dead of night the lost poems were recovered. This exhumation, however, haunted Dante Gabriel Rossetti for the rest of his life and he attempted to contact Siddal numerous times through seances. He attempted suicide shortly after the exhumation.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti had two mistresses before his death, but it was the influence of his wife and muse Elizabeth Siddal that helped shape his art and make it what it was and what it will always be remembered for today.

Sources: wikipedia, victorianweb.org, victorianartinbritain.co.uk