Elizabeth Siddal and Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Elizabeth Siddal

Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (1829-62)  Pre-Raphaelite muse, model and artist is best known as the model for Ophelia by John Everett Millais and  her anguished relationship with the key Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood artist-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The sad circumstances of her early death from a laudanum overdose and her subsequent exhumation adding to the mystique of her story.

DG Rossetti E Siddal 1854

Discovered by chance working in a milliners shop,  feted for her beauty by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood , she became the star  face of early Pre-Raphaelite art . Falling in love with her, Rossetti declared "he had found his destiny".  As  his prized "Guggums" her beauty inspired his art and poetry, and she in turn  became his pupil developing into an artist in her own right. 

Over the course of ten years  their relationship  was dogged by her increasing ill-health and  developing drug addiction, his  philandering and reluctance to marry leading to estrangement. After a virtual  two year separation  finding her seriously ill , Rossetti  married her.  Their marriage was to last less than 2 years. After giving birth to a still born child, she was to die tragically herself a few months later following an overdose of laudanum , with rumours of a suicide note being burnt.

In the most celebratory  acts connected with his name, Rossetti in his grief  buried his unpublished manuscript of poetry with her only to  exhume her  body seven years later for their retrieval. The descriptions of the beauty of Lizzie's corpse from the bystanders present added to the folklore associated with her. Haunted to the last by  his own guilt for her overdose and the exhumation, Rossetti's  reputation has been tainted ever since.

Their  story  has been subject of rumour , controversy and conjecture, Rossetti often being portrayed as the culprit whose bachelor lifestyle, inability to commit and womanising caused heartache and drove her illness and addiction or conversely  Lizzie  presented as a needy woman who used her  illness to manipulate Rossetti into marrying her when he no longer loved her.

MUSE AND MODEL

Elizabeth ( known as Lizzie) Eleanor Siddall  (changing the spelling later to Siddal  probably at Rossetti's request) was born in 7 Charles Street,  Hatton Gardens, London the daughter of a Sheffield  cutler and ironmonger on July 25 1829. Not much is known about her early life. Although working class, her father  had aspirations towards gentility. Convinced that they had been unjustly disinherited from property and an aristocratic title , he took the case to court

A female contemporary recalled Lizzie as having "eyes were a kind of luminous golden brown agate-colour, slender, elegant figure, tall for those days, beautiful deep-red hair that fell in soft heavy wings ... She did not talk happily, (was) excited and melancholy, though with much humour and tenderness."

Rossetti's brother, William, wrote that she was "a most beautiful creature with an air between dignity and greatness; tall, finely formed with a lofty neck and regular yet somewhat uncommon features; greenish-blue unsparkling eyes, brilliant complexion and a lavish heavy wealth of copper-golden hair .She had a modest self-respect and a disdainful reserve.

Other recollections of her attest to  a lively wit and a sharp sense of humour.

 According to tradition she was "discovered " around 1849-50, while working  in a milliners shop run  in Cranborne Alley off Leicester Square,  by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Walter Deverell  (according to some reports William Allingham the poet discovered her and suggested  her as potential model to  Deverell ).  However an alternative version also exists  that Deverell probably met her when she took some dressmaking designs to the Government School of Design , where he worked as an assistant master. Not conventionally beautiful by Victorian standards, she became feted by the Pre-Raphaelites for her beauty. Deverell boasted   of the "stupendously beautiful creature...magnificently tall with a lovely figure and a face of the most delicate and finished modelling"

After Deverell's mother had visited the family's shop and lodging , just off the Old Kent Road , to reassure them, Lizzie embarked on her career as a model  posing for Deverell as the figure of Viola in Twelfth Night, Unable to paint the exact shade of her hair , Deverell asked assistance from his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti  modelling as the Jester for the same work. Through Deverell Lizzie was introduced to the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and modelled in addition  for William Holman Hunt , Rossetti and John Everett Millais

John Everett Millais Ophelia 1851-2

Within two years  Millais would make her the face of early  Pre-Raphaelitism in one of the most iconic of all Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Ophelia.

 Required to spend hours in a heavy brocade dress in a bath full of water depicting Ophelia near to suicide she became seriously ill when  candles keeping the water warm went out on one occasion.  Her concerned  parents were obliged to call a doctor and angrily threatened to sue Millais for £50  who duly paid . Although she recovered, her health was possibly affected for the rest of her life due to this episode. Considered to be an excellent likeness of Lizzie, Ophelia was exhibited at the Royal Academy to great critical acclaim. One critic's comment  her most lovely countenance, there is an Innocence, disturbed by Insanity and a sort of Enjoyment strangely blended with lineaments of woe" After 1852 at his request Lizzie modelled exclusively Rossetti being  his principal  model up to 1858.

PRE-MARRIAGE

Gabriel Dante Rossetti

DG Rossetti Self Portrait 1847

Born in London in 12 May 1828,  aspiring poet and artist Gabriel Dante Rossetti was the son of a celebrated Italian scholar and from a well educated and  gifted family. His sister was the poet Christina Rossetti.  With William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais  he was one of the key members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, essentially a youthful anti-establishment art society dedicated to reforming contemporary art , espousing the ideals of early renaissance art and in making art "true to nature" 

Described variously as charismatic, gregarious, and impetuous, he also had a reputation for being deliberately provocative and hurtful as well as being capable of great charm and wit. Often described as short he was 5" 8" with strong Italian looks developing a reputation as a womaniser.  Sharing his father's passion for the 14th century Florentine poet Dante Alighieri and his great platonic love and muse Beatrice, he chose to be known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

DG Rossetti Elizabeth Siddal 1855

Apparently taken with Lizzie on meeting her , he described her by the phrase he coined  as " a stunner" . According to his brother he fell "deeply and profusely " in love with her, and they became engaged in 1851, although not formally .

In an Artist's Studio

"One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:" Christina Rossetti 1854

After 1852, she agreed to his request to model for him exclusively, virtually moving into his studio 14 Chatham Place, Blackfriars. As she also became his pupil at the same time it provided a convenient excuse for them to be together. Said to have been  totally wrapped up and absorbed with each other, they were described by one friend at this time as" Adam and Eve in Paradise"  Calling her Guggums , Gug, Sid and Dove  (She called him Gug) ,he sketched her compulsively . His sketches and drawings of  her  often depicting her as pensive and introspective  are said to have numbered in thousands and  were described by one contemporary as giving her "unworldly simplicity and purity of aspect" The artist Ford Madox Brown noted in his diary that Rossetti showed him "a drawer full of 'Guggums',....it is like a monomania with him". 

She is looking lovelier than ever..... I, made sketches of her dear head with iris stuck in her dear hair "  May 1854 (Rossetti visiting Lizzie convalescing in Hastings)

Under his tutelage she developed her skills in art and poetry even collaborating together on some works. Extremely proud of her work,  he labelled her" a creative genius"  introducing her to his friend , the eminent Victorian art critic John Ruskin.  Ruskin  bought up her entire collection for £30 ,and thereafter in 1855 offered her £150 a year on the basis he could have first refusal of her paintings. Her work was exhibited in the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition of 1857.

Her Health

DG Rossetti Miss Elizabeth Siddal 
1854

From 1853  Lizzie began to suffer from increasing   recurrent  bouts of ill health which left her in pain, bedridden, vomiting  and unable to eat . Taking ever greater amounts of the opiate tranquilliser laudanum , she built up an addiction to add to her problems 

 Her illness was not specifically diagnosed. One doctor noted curvature of the spine on one occasion , and  another .‘mental power long pent up and lately overtaxed”    Rossetti's biographer, his brother, stated she suffered from neuralgia and phthisis ( a type of tuberculosis). Other suggestions have included anorexia, and recently  Bill Bryson ( At Home) suggested Fowler's Solution( a  diluted arsenic compound)  popularly taken at the time  for the complexion. Whatever the reason for her ill health, her laudanum use worsened her mental and physical condition overall.

Despite taking a number of trips to convalesce ( going away to France for over 7 months on one occasion) her health continued to deteriorate. The toll her illness took on her looks  noted by the artist Ford Madox Brown in a diary entry 1855: "Called on Dante Rossetti. Saw Miss Siddal, looking thinner and more deathlike and more beautiful and more ragged than ever; a real artist, a woman without parallel for many a long year. Gabriel as usual diffuse and inconsequent in his work. Drawing wonderful and lovely Guggums one after another, each one a fresh charm, each one stamped with immortality, and his picture never advancing."

Rossetti's philandering with other women  further strained the relationship. Notorious for his womanising, the most significant was his affair with  model Annie Miller,  the fiance of close friend and fellow  Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood artist, William Holman Hunt. The affair led to a temporary rupture between Lizzie and Rossetti in  1856 with Lizzie reportedly throwing Rossetti's sketches of Annie out and telling Ford Madox Brown's wife Emma that "Rossetti had transferred his affections to Annie Miller and does nothing , but talk of her.... He is mad past care"  .  

Why Does He Not Marry Her? 

After five years together Rossetti's continued reluctance to marry compounded her misery . His friends were puzzled . In 1855, Ford Madox Brown noted." She is a stunner and no mistake. Rossetti once told me that, when he first saw her, he felt his destiny was defined. Why does he not marry her?"  Considered lovers,  growing older, ill and a loss of reputation added to her insecurity. John Ruskin  urged Rossetti to act  " it would be best for you to marry, for the sake of giving Miss Siddal complete protection and care, and putting an end to the peculiar sadness, and want of you hardly know what, that there is in both of you" (30 April 1855).

Numerous reasons have been cited for Rossetti's reluctance and ambivalence to commit: her ill-health, her class and status, disapproval of by his family (kept away from his family, she only met his mother once during their  so- called engagement), his own disinclination, or  lack of   money or other women. 

 William Bell Scott  suggests that Rossetti's intentions may not have been serious. He  recounted the following while visiting Rossetti one evening::" I found myself in the romantic dusk of the apartment face to face with Rossetti and a lady whom I did not recognise, and could scarcely see. He did not introduce her; she rose to go. I made a little bow, which she did not acknowledge ; and she left. This was Miss Siddal. Why he did not introduce me to her I cannot say.... I had not yet heard of such a person as Miss Siddal. Perhaps Rossetti was already beginning to revise his intention of marriage : an even way of life the most unlikely possible to suit his late development."  As part of this late development, William Bell Scott noted the other women who came into Rossetti's "orbit" and their "overpowering attractions" most notably Fanny Cornforth. 

With Lizzie's distress palpable, Rossetti was torn and felt honour bound to marry making rash promises only to postpone  leaving her mortified and furious. On one occasion in 1856 promising marriage and a trip to Algeria, and again after he had received due payment for some work , only to receive the due payment for nothing to happen. Later in 1857 after another  promise he borrowed ten pounds from Ford Madox Brown to buy the marriage licence only to spend it on something else . His friend Brown noted  " he does not know his own mind for one day"  

DG Rossetti Jane Morris 1857

Estrangement

After these empty promises with Rossetti's reluctance obvious and his affections waning,  the relationship was in meltdown. Lizzie appeared to need to escape. She refused all further money from her patron John Ruskin and left London to convalesce in Derbyshire in 1857, and attended a local art school in Sheffield for a short time  . By this stage, despite some visits by Rossetti at the end of this year when she became ill again, their engagement was effectively over . At this time  busy in Oxford with his colleague William Morris painting murals for the Oxford Union,  Rossetti encountered  another stunner 17 year old Jane Burden, an ostler's daughter at the theatre . 

Both he and Morris  fell in love with her . Jane accepted Morris' proposal and they married in 1859.  Rossetti never lost or hid his love for Jane thereafter, and would immortalise her in his work. Later at the end of his life he would tell the the author Sir Hall Caine later that he had fallen in love with Jane, but did not pursue it at the time due to his relationship with Lizzie. 

Bocca Baciata ( The Kissed Mouth) DG Rossetti 1859
Model Fanny Cornforth

Leaving Lizzie in Matlock early 1858, Rossetti sealed his rejection of her emphatically by embarking on a  long-term relationship with  Fanny Cornforth  (real name Sarah Cox) whom according to some reports he had first met in 1856.  Reputedly a former prostitute, his liaison with her triggered a dramatic erotically charged change  in his art and poetry.  Bocca Baciata ,  for which she modelled , was the first of his  famed overtly sensuous depictions  of beautiful women . Fanny would remain with him for the rest of his life as mistress or friend.

With a new mistress in tow  and possibly other relationships,  Rossetti did not appear to have any further contact with Lizzie. Fanny Cornforth,  Annie Miller and the actress Ruth Herbert were now the models for his work. Not mentioned  in any of  his letters or in  any contemporary memoirs very little is known about Lizzie or her whereabouts  from mid 1858 to 1860 . Now aged 29 and ill, and last seen by him in Matlock, Derbyshire,   Henrietta Garnett in Wives and Stunners suggests a sad scenario that probably without funds  "she had crawled back to her parents house in Southward and stayed there quietly"  

MARRIAGE

DG Rossetti -Elizabeth Siddal 1860

 In April  1860 after a virtual two year estrangement she was to re-enter Rossetti's life in a dramatic fashion. Alerted  possibly by Ruskin who had received a letter from her family that she was in Hastings, desperately ill ,  Rossetti  decided to visit her and took everyone by surprise by suddenly announcing his forthcoming marriage.

Finding her in a serious condition and wretched at their old lodgings in Hastings, he was appalled. Addicted to laudanum, emaciated, bedridden ,vomiting and unable to eat , she seemed to him at the point of death. He decided to make good his promise to marry her .  Overcome  and conscience stricken,  he informed his mother:" I write you this word to say that Lizzie and I are going to be married at last, in as few days as possible. Like all the important things I ever meant to do- to fulfil duty or secure happiness-this one has been deferred almost beyond possibility. I have hardly deserved that Lizzie should still consent to it, but she has done so, and I trust I may still have time to prove my thankfulness to her".

To his brother he revealed his feelings of guilt writing: "the ordinary licence we already have, and I still trust to God we may be enabled to use it. If not, I should have so much to grieve for, and (what is worse) so much to reproach myself with, that I do not know how it might end for me."

 Needing to postpone the wedding day as she was too ill to walk down the aisle, they married on 23 May 1860 in St Clement's Church, Hastings, England. No family members or wedding guests were present. After the wedding they honeymooned in Paris.

DG Rossetti Regina Cordium 1860
 Lizzie's Wedding portrait.

Back in London, she continued frail and ill throughout their marriage constantly taking laudanum "and other stimulants" .Too ill to work on her own, she managed to colloborate with Rossetti on the Red House project, the home of William and Jane Morris; by some accounts witnessing and made miserable by Rossetti's open feelings for Jane Morris.

Given his  previous reluctance to marry , Jan Marsh writes that Rossetti proved an "uxorious husband"  however conflicting accounts exist on the subject of his fidelity as the marriage progressed particular in respect of his relationship with Fanny Cornforth, his mistress before his marriage and after Lizzie's death who still modelled for him.  Nevertheless Lizzie  needed his company, Georgiana Burne Jones noted "Gabriel’s presence seemed needed to set her jarring nerves straight, for her whole manner changed when he came into the room."  

Shortly after marriage,  overjoyed to become pregnant but still  taking laudanum for morning sickness, she gave  birth to a stillborn baby girl in May 1861 left suffering from severe post natal depression. Georgiana Burne- Jones recalled a sad incident while visiting them.  "We found her sitting in a low chair with the childless cradle on the floor beside her and ..she cried with a kind of soft wildness as we came in, "Hush.., you'll wake it".  Tragically Lizzie was to die herself within several months.

The evening of 10th February, 1862 after having been out to dinner accompanied by the poet Swinburne, they returned home around 8 o'clock, and Rossetti advised her to go to bed and went out again. It is not exactly clear as to where he went, possibly the Working Men's College where he  normally taught on that day but there was speculation that they had argued and that he had later visited Fanny Cornforth 

According to Rossetti on returning home late about 11.30 p.m. he was unable to rouse her and finding an empty phial  of laudanum by her bedside, he summoned a doctor and friends immediately. Although a stomach pump was used , they were unable to save her .She died at 7.20 a.m. the following morning on  11th February from a massive overdose of laudanum  pregnant at the time. 

Unable to accept what had happened, Rossetti summoned four doctors to verify death. Thereafter still convinced she was in coma. Rossetti's brother recalled "a moment of great agitation, when my brother, standing by the corpse, was crying out, “Oh Lizzie, Lizzie, come back to me!”on the second or third day after death Lizzie looked still lovelier than before, and Dante almost refused to believe that she was really dead—it might be a mere trance consequent upon the laudanum. He insisted that Mr. Marshall should be called in to decide" 

The coroner ruled the death as accidental despite rumours of a suicide note which had been destroyed;  suicide preventing a Christian burial. At the inquest Rossetti confirmed that it was normal for his wife to take up to  100 drops of laudanum at one time stating that she took it in order to eat or sooth her nerves. Later, as suspected , the existence of a suicide note , pinned to her nightdress, did emerge. Rossetti had shown the note which included the plea to take care of  Harry( her brother )to his close friend Ford Madox Brown who had advised it should be burnt.  Later in 1928 the author Hall Caine confirmed that Rossetti admitted to him the existence of a suicide note and his guilt over it. In a biography published in 1949 Rossetti's niece, and Ford Madox Brown's granddaughter, Helen Angeli Rossetti confirmed the existence of the suicide note, and visits to her father from Lizzie's brother Harry to collect money.

Jan Marsh has suggested that a note .. does not prove that Lizzie meant to die, for she must have known that Gabriel was due back within a couple of hours, and she may well have trusted to him to save her... her behaviour fits more into the pattern of severe addiction .

E Siddal photo circa1860

 Just prior to her burial , Rossetti guilt-ridden placed the only manuscript copy of his poems awaiting publication in the coffin with Lizzie between her cheek and hair stating"I have often been writing at those poems when Lizzie was ill and suffering, and I might have been attending to her, and now they shall go."

She was buried in the Rossetti family plot in Highgate Cemetry , London on 17th February 1862. After her death Swinburne wrote" I never knew so brilliant and appreciative a woman—so quick to see and so keen to enjoy that rare and deIightful fusion of wit, humour..she was a wonderful as well as a most lovable creature".

Aftermath

By 1863 Rossetti's mistress Fanny Cornforth had taken up residence with him, euphemistically known as his housekeeper. However Lizzie's presence remained with him.  In the decade following her death  he suffered from increasing bouts of melancholia and depression. He told friends that he saw her ghost for two years after her death and held seances trying to contact her to check if she was happy.

Never marrying again, he began an impassioned affair with Jane Morris. As his great love,  principal muse and model from 1865 onwards, his infatuation with her precipitated a major mental and physical collapse in the view of his close friends.

DG Rossetti Beata Beatrix 1870

Working from his sketches and memories , he painted a haunting poetic memorial to Lizzie, Beata Beatrix.

 The painting shows the moment when Beatrice the love of the Italian poet Dante becomes divine after death. Lizzie's death is symbolised by the poppy  the dove is carrying. He also copied six of her poems to be published in a volume of poetry by his sister, Christina Rossetti ( however they were described as too hopelessly sad  to be included) and bought back and collected Lizzie's works of art.

By 1869 now writing love sonnets to Jane Morris, Rossetti regretted his impetuous act of placing his unpublished poems with Lizzie considering himself   to be a poet just as much as an artist. Suffering from eyesight problems and concerned about his ability to paint, he wanted to secure his reputation. 

His friend Charles Howell persuaded him to give him permission to petition the Home Secretary on his behalf for Lizzie's coffin to be exhumed from the family grave. The Home secretary who knew Rossetti, issued the permit.

On 5th October 1869 in Highgate Cemetery the disinterment from the family plot was carried out late at night to avoid publicity without the family's knowledge, Rossetti not attending personally.  In an eerie scene, against a backdrop of lanterns and a bonfire,  Lizzie's coffin was exhumed and( a worm ridden) manuscript retrieved. Howell reported to his wife later that Lizzie's beauty had been preserved through the effects of laudanum and that her red-gold hair had continued to grown now filling the coffin.

DG Rossetti -photo1863

Feeling guilty at the desecration Rossetti justified his action by stating that Lizzie would have approved of it " could she have opened the grave, no other hand would have been needed." His poems  were published in 1870

Becoming increasingly reclusive, Rossetti's final ten years , became known as the chloral years, due to his dependence on the drug, and saw his physical and emotional decline sinking into  ever-greater bouts of paranoia and delusion  on one occasion convinced that a chaffinch was Lizzie's spirit come to warn him.

Mirroring Lizzie, he attempted suicide in 1872 by overdosing on laudanum possibly triggered by a combination of ill health, the emotional consequences of his relationship with Jane Morris and a particularly virulent review of his poetry- having always been neurotic about criticism of his work.

Towards the end of his life, he  regretted the exhumation and in a fit of depression confirmed  to the author Hall Caine  his guilt over a lack of affection leading  Lizzie to overdose. One of his last poems remembered her: 

Ah! then was it all Spring weather?
Nay, but we were young and together.
Ah! dear one, you've been dead so long,—
How long until we meet again,

Haunted to the last , he specifically requested.." Let me not on any account be buried at Highgate" and was buried at Birchington On Sea, near Hastings on 9th April, 1882.