The Enigma of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, Elizabeth Siddal, Lizzie Siddal: The Struggle to See Beyond the Muse-Turned-Lover

Born to a poor family in 1829 in central London, ‘Lizzie Siddal’ was working in a milliner shop close to what is now Leicester Square when, in either late 1849 or 1850, Walter Deverell walked in with his mother and saw “a most beautiful creature, with an air between dignity and sweetness, mixed with something which exceeded modest self-respect,” in a backroom of the store.1 Initially estimating her to be “not fully seventeen years of age”, but later recording her to be around twenty years old (her exact date of birth is unknown), Deverell recounted that she was “tall, finely formed, with a lofty neck, and regular yet somewhat uncommon features, greenish-blue unsparkling eyes, large perfect eyelids, brilliant complexion, and a lavish wealth of coppery-golden hair”.2 He was at once “on fire to paint this strangely favoured beauty” and asked her to model as Viola for his 1850 painting, Twelfth Night, depicting act II, scene 4 of Shakespeare’s play of the same name.3 She quickly became a favourite of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood artists and regularly modelled for Deverell as well as William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whom she later modelled for exclusively before they eventually married in 1860. Siddal became pregnant but gave birth to a stillborn child in 1861 and subsequently fell into a depression that ended with her intentionally overdosing on laudanum, to which she had been addicted, thus ending her life in February 1862. Rossetti, distraught by her death, chose to bury her with the only copy of his poems which he had dedicated to and written about her. Siddal lives on in the work of Pre-Raphaelite artists, her ethereal beauty forever etched into art history.

1: Walter Deverell, Twelfth Night (1850). (Siddal far left)

Narratives of her life, such as this, are oft repeated by the canonical history of art, but they are based entirely on the few moments she could be intertwined with a male artist – the artworks and poetry she created in her own right are left out, so too is her involvement, as the only female artist, in the first Pre-Raphaelite exhibition in 1857, that Rossetti changed the spelling of her name from ‘Siddall’ to ‘Siddal’ (“there is possession in naming”), thus removing her from her middle-class upbringing and beginning to construct ‘Lizzie Siddal’ who history remembers, and that seven years after her death Rossetti abandoned his melodramatic gesture of eternal love and secretly exhumed her body, under the cover of darkness, to retrieve the poems and have them published.4 The omission of her life outside the parameters of the Pre-Raphaelites, particularly Rossetti, has been the focus of many feminist critiques and interventions which aim to reconsider her work and how she is remembered in the historical narrative with a feminist lens in order to better understand her impact on the Pre-Raphaelites and wider art history.

Often thought to be an exclusively male group due to the title of ‘Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’, sometimes simply referred to as ‘The Brotherhood’, women, in fact, played an active role within the movement beyond models and muses. As art historian and writer Katy Hessel notes, women were "aware of their oppression in society, and of the passivity of their poses in the work of men," it is for this reason, she explains, that the women involved in the movement “often chose strong heroines of the past as their subjects, and depicted women as symbols of strength, humility and intellect.”5 This can be seen in Siddall’s work, both painting and poetry, which show her creative agency and her awareness of the gender boundaries and archetypes she was encased by. No historian seriously addressed the work of Pre-Raphaelite women before feminist art historians, specifically Deborah Cherry, who first called attention to Siddall in the early 1980s.

Figure 2: Elizabeth Siddall, Self Portrait (c.1853-54).

Born Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, she was the daughter of a working-class family who owned cutlery and watch making businesses, and it is possible that the store Deverell first saw her in was one also owned by her father where she was apprenticing. Like many families of the Victorian era, the Siddall’s believed modelling to be an inappropriate occupation for a young woman and ensured she remained employed as a milliner well after she began modelling. After contracting pneumonia from the frigid waters of John Everett Millais’s bathtub while modeling for Ophelia (1851-2), her father demanded £50 (equivalent to over £8,000 today) for his “carelessness” and the matter was eventually settled with Millais being required to pay the total amount of her medical bills. While John Guille Millais, the artist’s son, attempted to acquit his father of blame and assuage those reading his journals by assuring that “Miss Siddal, quickly recovering, was none the worse for her cold bath”, she was, in fact, plagued by illness resultant of her pneumonia and quickly became addicted to the laudanum meant to ease her pain.6

Figure 3: Elizabeth Siddall, The Lady of Shalott (1853).

After appearing in many artworks by the core group of Pre-Raphaelite artists, Rossetti became obsessed with Siddall and came to “take possession of her”, he simultaneously “guarded her jealously and handled her preciously”, insisting that she only model for him from 1853 onwards.7 Around this time, she also began producing her own artworks and was hailed a “genius” by the notoriously misanthropic art critic John Ruskin, who offered her a stipend of £150 per year (equivalent to over £20,000 today), which she received in 1855 and 1856.8 Ruskin also invited her to examine his collection of medieval manuscripts, after which, Siddall’s paintings saw a dramatic change from black-and-white drawings and dark oil portraits to small watercolours depicting colourful scenes of female protagonists in a medieval style, subverting the male gaze she herself had so often been depicted through. Although, aware of being valued only for her beauty, her poetry highlights her struggle as a woman in the nineteenth-century and is often about the hypocrisy of men who love women only for their physical beauty, as seen in ‘The Lust of the Eyes’ (1854), which begins with, “I care not for my Lady’s soul, / Though I worship before her smile / … Low sit I down at my Lady’s feet, / Gazing through her wild eyes, / Smiling to think how my love will fleet / When their starlike beauty dies”.9

Siddall’s relationship with Rossetti grew closer and it is possible that they became informally engaged in 1853 or 1854, although, Rossetti’s obsession with her had lapsed by 1856 when he began affairs with the then seventeen year-old Jane Burden along with other frequent models to the Brotherhood including, but not limited to, Annie Miller and Fanny Cornforth, the latter whom he maintained as his mistress until the end of his life.10 After ending her relationship with Rossetti, Siddall then began her formal training at the Sheffield School of Art in 1857 and continued writing poetry and painting, being the only woman to be included in the first Pre-Raphaelite exhibition in May of that same year with her work Clerk Saunders (1857) shown in the London exhibition before also touring through New York, Philadelphia and Boston in 1858.

Figure 4: Elizabeth Siddall, Clerk Saunders (1857).

Depicting the folk tale of the same name wherein May Margaret gifts her phantom lover, Clerk Saunders, a willow wand in order to bring him back to life after being stabbed by her brothers, Siddall’s image is modelled off of Walter Scott’s retelling in his 1807 publication Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, her copy, now located in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, has this specific page ripped out.11 Importantly, her depiction of the fable includes a detail not mentioned in Scott’s Minstrelsy from which she was working: highlighted by pale bindings sat against bright blue cloth lies Margaret’s Book of Hours, much like the one Siddall viewed in Ruskin’s collection two years earlier. This is of great significance given that, in addition to not being mentioned by Scott, the presence of the book is also not otherwise found in any written retelling or visual imagery depicting the ballad, indicating that this was Siddall’s own creative agency in action.

Her decision to exercise her own agency in a commonly depicted scene reflects the nature of the Book of Hours in the medieval period during which time the books were intensely personal with owners selecting their own content, style, imagery and finishings, some even having themselves painted into the miniatures.12 Here, Siddall flexes her historical knowledge as well as her artistic prowess: she knows a Book of Hours would most definitely have been owned by a woman, indeed anyone of this time period, unlike other sacred books which would have been unattainable for a layperson, as Margaret was, that it would have been smaller than a psalter, thinner than a bible and displayed on a prayer lectern, and she is able to use her knowledge to allow the viewer to clearly identify it.13 Furthermore, Nat Reeve notes that medieval texts seen to be owned by women in other Pre-Raphaelite paintings are shown open with the pages visible, William Morris’ La Belle Iseult (1858) and Evelyn de Morgan’s The Soul’s Prison House (1880) for example, and that, by staying shut, Siddall’s painting “achieves an unsettling effect” by preserving ambiguity and her own thoughts in an otherwise precise scene.14

Figure 5: Evelyn De Morgan, The Soul’s Prison House (1880-88).

Figure 6: William Morris, La Belle Iseult (1858).

Given her artistic ability and historical prominence, it is a wonder why her achievements are still seldom discussed outside feminist art history or unrelated to Rossetti. The expungement of Siddall’s work has been a focus of many contemporary art history scholars who have attempted to make feminist interventions but run into significant issues often found when conducting research on women who have been framed as muses – annexing a woman, any woman, into the art historical canon cannot shift its gender paradigm and therefore cannot change the way she is viewed. As such, without writing an entirely new history of Pre-Raphaelitism, and art history as a whole, Siddall will remain marginal, depicted only by the gaze of masculinity.

The masculine gaze heavily romanticised Siddall as a wild, ethereal enchantress plucked from anonymity, as the passive muse-turned-lover, as the embodiment of beauty who was buried with intimate poetry that only she will ever know. These are fuelled by stories of her as being an ethereal beauty who was “obsessed” with the notion of death and eventually succumbed to her madness. More likely, however, the romanticisation of her ‘illness’ was in alignment with the Victorian age requirement that women have a certain level of madness, insanity or illness, in order to be sexually appealing to men. Here, again, women are seen to be valued only for their beauty and diligent appeasement of the male ego, which is reflective of a society that had, according to Dijkstra, “come to see even expression of insanity as representative of devotion to the male”.15 It should also be noted that intertwining femininity and hysteria is an age-old tactic of the patriarchy that has continuously reinforced misogynistic beliefs surrounding the capabilities of women and that their ‘natural’ position is that of wives, mothers and ardent caretakers. Furthermore, by framing Siddall, or any other woman, in the light of madness or illness, the male takes centre stage and he is able to project his sexual fantasies that she is for him, and, akin to Siddall being depicted as an idealised beauty created by and for the male gaze in the artworks she modeled for, she thus becomes society’s idealised woman as devoted entirely and endlessly to Rossetti.

Much in the same way that the historical canon romanticises Siddall’s life, so too does it fetishise her as a tortured beauty loved by the brilliant artist, both for the benefit and pleasure of the patriarchal paradigm, and this same association between a woman’s madness, insanity or illness with feminine devotion can also be used to explain why Siddall became the object of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s fetishisation and sexual fantasies in the first place: so fervent was she, to these artists and the work they were producing, that she would happily remain freezing in a bathtub for hours on end, to the point of pneumonia, to ensure that great art may be created; so faithful was she, to her role as a muse and lover, that she would defy nature and remain “perfectly preserved, eternal in her beauty”, in her grave, seven years after her death.16 Such a sentiment was invigorated by Rossetti who, after meeting Siddall in 1850, assigned her the role of Beatrice Portinari, the object of Dante Alighieri’s obsession, so as to further live out his fantasies of being the incarnation of the thirteenth-century poet. At this time, he also stopped signing his letters with ‘Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti’ as he was Christened with or ‘Gabriel Charles’ which he used previously, instead using ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’.17 Like Siddall, there is scarcely little known of Beatrice Portinari’s life outside the gaze of their respective Dantes’ and Portinari, too, was the object of his obsession but died young, at the age of 25.

As Dante continued to use his ideal image of Portinari in his writings after her death, Rossetti, too, continued using Siddall’s image in his art, drawing parallels between her and the Beatrice of Dante’s writing, which further romanticised her for viewers by connecting her with Dante’s poetry and allowed Rossetti to continue fetishising her in his fantasies long after her death. This culminated ten years after Siddall’s death in Rossetti’s homage to his muse, Beata Beatrix (1871-72), wherein he imagines Siddall’s and Portinari’s deaths to be one in the same. While Rossetti meant for Beata Beatrix to be a tribute to Siddall, he was adamant that the artwork does not represent or recount her death but rather portrays her as if in a trance or altered spiritual state, suggesting he didn’t think of her as deceased but simply “perfectly preserved” and waiting to be reawakened.18 The abundance of symbolism in the work references both women and Dante’s La Vita Nuova (1295) poem, with elements such as the Ponte Vecchio bridge in Florence, where the poem was set, forming a halo above the subject’s head and a white poppy being dropped into her hands by a frozen bird, referencing the opium derivative on which Siddall overdosed. The sundial pointing to the number nine is in reference to the hour of Portinari’s death and the age Dante met her.19 Interestingly, little mention has been made of the undeniable phallic quality of the sundial which projects towards the frozen ecstasy of Beatrice’s slightly ajar, or perhaps slowly opening, mouth. Rossetti has even inserted himself into the narrative with his figure seen in the upper right, just above the sundial and adjacent to her anticipatory mouth – in Rossetti’s mind, she is not dead, simply frozen in time and waiting to be reawakened by his phallic masculinity.

Figure 7: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix (c.1864–70).

While Pre-Raphaelitism in the mid-to-late nineteenth century was largely overshadowed by the Impressionist movement, especially outside the UK, a revival of interest in Victorian art in the twentieth century relished in the romanticised and fetishised narratives put forth by the Pre-Raphaelites and propelled them internationally. Framing of Rossetti as “the nearest thing we have to a love painter” and Siddall as “a Preraphaelite [sic] passion”, during this revival fabricated a nineteenth century love story wherein Rossetti’s possessiveness is portrayed as romantic courtship and Siddall’s role in the wider movement is enlarged.20 Griselda Pollock and Deborah Cherry note that such narratives often also present ‘Siddal’ as a singular symbol for the entirety of Pre-Raphaelite art, such as William Fredeman, who concluded that “she stood for what it all meant”, and “she combined in her fragile beauty and in her tragic life the legendary aspect that inspired the movement’s art”.21 The fusion of ‘Siddal’ and Pre-Raphaelitism has carried over into the twenty-first century wherein she is still referred to in both mass media and the art institution as ‘Siddal’, often even ‘Lizzie Siddal’, as “art’s greatest supermodel” and “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ethereal muse”, thus continuing to alter her into a signifier for Pre-Raphaelitism and the establishment of masculine dominance and female subordination in the Victorian era, and identifying her only through the male gaze as it was established in the nineteenth century and modernised in the twentieth.

Historical femininity has been constructed in terms of difference, woman being the ‘Other’, and subordination to masculinity. In this construction, female sexuality was organised by the dichotomy of the Madonna/Magdalen, or as it is now often referred to as, the virgin/whore. While women of previous time periods were seen to hold qualities of both the whoreish Madonna and the virginal Magdalen, the Victorian period redefined this complex as a distinction between women, aided by visual representations of a fabricated past that regulated contemporary feminine sexuality.22 Rossetti, whose deepest belief was that the literal and metaphysical mystery of existence is enshrined in women, took part in this redefinition by framing Siddall and his other female models as pure, virginal femininity. In the exhibition catalogue of Tate Gallery’s 1984 exhibition ‘The Pre-Raphaelites’, Alan Bowness noted that even his early devotional images, such as The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850), were less worship of Christian figures than of feminine purity, beauty and virginity. Rossetti’s images were, in his own words, “a symbol of female excellence. The virgin being taken as its highest type”.23 Shown fourteen years after the eruption of feminist art history, many feminist historians reported their disappointment in Tate’s exhibition and its accompanying literature which was, for the most part, positioned in opposition to the knowledge produced by feminist art history in the previous decade-and-a-half. With the knowledge that images of women depicted by Pre-Raphaelite artists are instruments of patriarchal regulation of feminine sexuality, feminist artists and historians continued in their efforts to highlight the marginalisation of women’s voices and the work created by women, which paved the way for Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn and their radical exhibition ‘Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists’, wherein a collection of work by women artists associated with Pre-Raphaelitism were presented for the first time. While the exhibition was well received, most critics failed to show genuine interest or engagement with the work but rather displayed a “gentlemanly chivalry about the efforts of Pre-Raphaelite women”, showing that women of the movement, whether artists or models, remained secondary to the creative output of Pre-Raphaelite men.24

Figure 8: Elizabeth Siddall, Lady Affixing a Pennant to a Knight's Spear (1856).

Feminist interventions challenge art history’s gender polarity by exposing how gender and cultural representations are put in place by patriarchal power systems which, in turn, construct social conventions within and outside of art. Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock note that there are several ways to conduct such an intervention, none of which are able to successfully reframe Siddall, nor any woman involved in artistic practice as artist or muse for that matter. The first of these, as illustrated by the Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists exhibition, is to change the narrative of Siddall by reassembling and constructing an authorial identity for her oeuvre, thereby providing more information on her artistic activities and positioning her as a creative individual, independent of her patriarchal definition.25 Doing so, however, cannot alter the established gender hierarchy in which the history of art has constructed the woman artist as secondary and prioritises the heroic, masculinist creativity of man. Therefore, simply annexing Siddall into the existing canon cannot change the marginal position in which she was viewed and depicted by the Pre-Raphaelites, and the historical record they wrote, and continues to be viewed by critics who offer little more than ‘gentlemanly chivalry’.

Figure 9: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Regina Cordium (1860).

The second strategy as outlined by Cherry and Pollock involves reconstructing Siddall through a wider assortment of historical materials, such as census returns, local directories, medical records and parish registers, which may allow her to be seen as a creative individual, or at the very least, an individual, beyond records of the Pre-Raphaelites.26 Here, again, the feminist intervention faces a similar historical bias as these documents are subject to the same gender power relations that determine who is recorded, how, by whom, and, most importantly, who is not.27 Reconstructing Siddall through the use of social records may then result in the same characterisation as produced by the art historical record: parish registers will show that she was around twenty years old when she was discovered in the milliners shop, just as Deverell said her to be; medical records will show that she was frail and often ill, just at Rossetti said her to be. It is, however, in the use of census returns and local directories that feminist interventions face the greatest hurdle. Referred to by the Pre-Raphaelites variously as ‘Lizzie Siddal’ and ‘Elizabeth Siddal’ but born Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, she lacks a fixed name which presents a suite of problems for historians trying to use censuses and directories but who are unable to identify her or her family members with any certainty.27 In art history, much the same as in a court of law, all cases must be proved without reasonable doubt that comes from such ambiguity.

Figure 10: Elizabeth Siddall, Madonna and Child with Angel (1856).

Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, Elizabeth Siddal, Lizzie Siddal, has been obscured by art historical narratives that serve patriarchal interest, both socially and artistically. While her portrayal as a frail, hysterical artist’s-model-turned-muse-turned-lover, is a reflection of Victorian social requirements for women and construction of femininity, the continuation of these characterisations into the twentieth century can only be attributed to modern scholar’s refusal to acknowledge an art history wherein women are not inconsequential and existing only for masculine romantic or sexual pleasure.

Feminist interventions have made strong headway into expanding the canon which has allowed us to see Siddall as more than a muse, but to see her as an individual artist beyond her ties to her male contemporaries and to understand her work and its impact on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the romanticised and fetishised perspectives of those writing her history must be undone. The historical bias of documentation commonly used to chronicle an artist’s life outside of their profession will inevitably limit our ability to do the same for Siddall and women like her, but this, of course, does not negate its necessity. Only once we do so can we realise that Siddall was not an ‘enigma’ after all, but merely an artist framed by masculine fantasies while working against the constraints of her time.

Notes

1. Jan Marsh, "Imagining Elizabeth Siddal", in History Workshop Journal, no. 25 (1988): 64-82.

2. Marsh, "Imagining Elizabeth Siddal".

3. Ibid.

4. Tülay Dağoğlu, Images of Woman in Pre-Raphaelite Visual and Textual Narratives, (Istanbul: Nobel Publishing, 2023).

“possession in naming” Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock, “Woman as Sign in Pre-Raphaelite Literature” in Vision and Difference (London and New York: Routledge Classic, 2003), originally published in Art History 7, no.2 (June 1984).

5. Katy Hessel, The Story of Art Without Men, (London: Hutchinson Heinemann, 2022), 88.

6. Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock, “Woman as Sign in Pre-Raphaelite Literature” in Vision and Difference (London and New York: Routledge Classic, 2003), originally published in Art History 7, no.2 (June 1984).

7. Timothy Hilton, The Pre-Raphaelites (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970).

8. Nat Reeve, “‘An Hour before the Day’: the dismembered Book of Hours in Elizabeth Siddal’s Clerk Saunders”, in Word & Image, 38 no. 2 (2022): 73-87. https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1923316

9. Elizabeth Siddal [sic], “The Lust of the Eyes”, in Ruskin: Rossetti: Preraphaetlitism: Papers 1854 to 1862, arranged and edited by William Michael Rossetti (London: George Allen, 1899), 155. The Internet Archive, contributed by Boston Public Library, October 31, 2011 (published), archive.org/details/ruskinrossettipr00ross/page/155/mode/2up

10. Cherry and Pollock, “Woman as Sign in Pre-Raphaelite Literature”.

11. Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border: by Sir Walter Scott, Bart., with his introductions, additions, and the editor’s notes, vols 3–4 (Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1807), 3: 175. Siddal’s copy, held in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, PB 12-2021.

12. Reeve, “‘An Hour before the Day’”.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Francesca Boccato “Elizabeth Siddal: A Complex Muse”, (Master thesis, Università degli Studi di Padova, 2020).

16. Amina Khan, “Elizabeth Siddal in Her Eyes”, Art Institute of Chicago, published December 7, 2023, https://www.artic.edu/articles/1093/elizabeth-siddal-in-her-eyes 

17. Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Tate Publishing, 2000).

18. The Pre-Raphaelites, The Tate Gallery (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1984). Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, shown at Tate Gallery 7 March - 28 May 1984.

19. The Pre-Raphaelites, The Tate Gallery.

20. Hilton, The Pre-Raphaelites.

21. Cherry and Pollock, “Woman as Sign in Pre-Raphaelite Literature”.

22. Ibid.

23. The Pre-Raphaelites, The Tate Gallery.

24. Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites.

25. Cherry and Pollock, “Woman as Sign in Pre-Raphaelite Literature”.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid.

Figure 1: Walter Deverell, Twelfth Night (1850). Oil on canvas, 101.6 x 132.1 cm. Private collection.

Figure 2: Elizabeth Siddall, Self Portrait (c.1853-54). Oil on canvas, 22.8 cm (circumference). Private collection.

Figure 3: Elizabeth Siddall, The Lady of Shalott (1853). Pen, black ink, sepia and pencil, 16.5 x 22.3 cm. The Maas Gallery, London, U.K.

Figure 4: Elizabeth Siddall, Clerk Saunders (1857). Watercolour and coloured chalk on paper, 28.4 x 18.1 cm. Fitzwilliam Museum, U.K.

Figure 5: Evelyn De Morgan, The Soul’s Prison House (1880-88). Oil on canvas, 78.7 x 50.8 cm. De Morgan Collection Foundation, U.K.

Figure 6: William Morris, La Belle Iseult (1858). Oil paint on canvas, 71.8 × 50.2 cm. Tate, U.K.

Figure 7: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix (c.1864–70). Oil on canvas, 86.4 × 66 cm. Tate, London, U.K.

Figure 8: Elizabeth Siddall, Lady Affixing a Pennant to a Knight's Spear (1856). Watercolour on paper, 13.7 x 13.7 cm. Tate, U.K.

Figure 9: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Regina Cordium (1860). Oil on panel, 25.4 x 20.3 cm. Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa.

Figure 10: Elizabeth Siddall, Madonna and Child with Angel (1856). Watercolor, gouache, and metallic paint on paper, 19.7 × 15.2 cm. Delaware Art Museum, U.S.A.