Millais’ head study for Ophelia

IT was not the easiest way to earn half a crown – but for Elizabeth Siddal it was all part of a day’s work.

She had climbed the steep stairs at the artist’s Gower Street studio, put on a ballgown and lay herself into a tin bath of water.

Painter JE Millais knew she would be immersed for some time and had rigged together a series of oil lamps beneath the tub to keep it a bearable temperature. However, one by one they failed and poor Lizzie soon must have felt she was method acting to get into the role of Ophelia: as she lay stock still, numbness crept through her body.

The resulting image of Shakespeare’s tragic Ophelia is perhaps one of the most famous likenesses of Hamlet’s beau.

A biography of Siddal, by art historian Jan Marsh, reveals the life of a key figure in the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the mid-Victorian period. Siddal was a model, muse and artist, and as the book reveals, she was a talent born into a world with strict pre-determined roles based on your gender and class.

Siddal knew what she wanted to do – and could recognise the illogical constraints placed on her by a male-oriented society.

Jan creates an enthralling picture of a woman who came to represent a particular form of Victorian beauty, which referred back to the age of chivalry – and the author seeks to tackle the myths and rumours that grew around this talented and ultimately tragic woman.

Born in July, 1829 in Holborn, Lizzie was the daughter of knife-maker Charles Siddal.

Originally from Sheffield, Charles was a skilled craftsman. His wife Elizabeth would bear eight children. Charles, as a skilled artisan, would have been comfortably off, but because of how he earned his living, he could never be considered a gentleman.

Siddal had an eye for culture from an early age. Jan reports her discovering Tennyson by reading verses in the papers used to wrap groceries.

She was home-schooled, learning to read and write, studying maths, scripture and sewing. Classes in deportment were also likely, and when her future husband, artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited the family home in 1855, he remarked on her acceptably comfortable upbringing.

Siddal first posed for an artist in 1849 when Walter Deverell dressed her as Shakespeare’s Viola.

How she was spotted has become one of the many enduring myths.

Jan reports it was believed she was spotted working in a millinery by the artist, a touching rags-to-riches beginning.

Later Lizzie told friends that she had got to know the family as a dressmaker. She had shown the artist’s father “designs”, as he was the principal of the School of Design. He then introduced Lizzie to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Elizabeth Siddal as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix [Art Institute of Chicago]

In the summer of 1852, Rossetti stayed in the garden cottage of graphic artist Edward Bateman in Highgate.

Siddal made herself at home in the ramshackle cottage as Rossetti painted her – and their relationship developed from artist and model to lovers. Siddal revealed her artistic ambitions and Rossetti took her on as a student.

Jan says a challenge of writing about Siddal was how much she was consumed as an adjutant to Rossetti’s life.

Biographers face a challenge untangling the pair, and raising her out of his shadow, she explains.
Jan says Siddal was “cast as a dove, a betrayed lover, a doomed victim, a drug addict, a supermodel and a Pre-Raphaelite icon,” in the public’s mind, yet this was far from accurate.

“Her story is not that of a Cinderella awaiting her prince, but of a resourceful Rosalind,” says Jan.

The author strips away the myth: drawing on what can be proven, cross referencing contemporary sources, the book sifts out the lies and misinterpretations to bring this astonishing woman back to life.

Siddal was described as being “tall and slender, with red, coppery hair and bright consumptive complexion”. Her look bewitched artists inspired by Arthurian legend, seeking to capture a sense of “Englishness.”

In November 1851 she first posed for Rossetti.

Through Rossetti, she would be noticed by art critic John Ruskin.

Rossetti offered to teach at Ruskin’s recently formed Working Men’s College, then in Red Lion Square, Holborn. Ruskin provided evening classes in art to workers, mentioning trades such as “sign painters, shop decorators and brick-makers and glass blowers”.

Ruskin liked Lizzie’s work and offered an annual £150 allowance in return for any work she did, or to buy pieces as they were completed.

Rossetti liked the idea of a secure income, but Siddal, keen to assert independence, was less happy to be tied in.

Ruskin said he believed she was a “genius”, and explained that if he saw a beautiful tree at risk of the chop, he’d do something about it, and if he saw a Gothic cathedral failing, he would act to save that, too.

“If you would be so good to consider yourself as a piece of wood or Gothic for a few months, I should be grateful for you,” he went on.

The book speaks of the couple’s love, the issues they faced – models were not considered respectable, and Siddal could not be considered a “lady”, making marriage a tricky proposition.

They were briefly estranged but patched things up in 1860, however, happiness was drained when Siddal lost a baby.

And then she died. She had been out for a meal with Rossetti, and had appeared sleepy when she got home. It would emerge that Siddal had been taking doses of the opium and high-strength alcohol mix, laudanum, and had overdosed.

“The poor thing had been in the habit of taking laudanum for two or three years in considerable doses and on Monday she must have taken more than her system can bear,” a doctor friend noted.

The verdict was death caused by “accidentally, casually and by misfortune,” ruling out suicide. She was buried in the Rossetti family plot in Highgate Cemetery.

Her body would not lie undisturbed. In his grief, Rossetti had placed a volume of his poetry on her body in the coffin, the result of 20 years of drafts and the only copy he had.

Six years after her death, with his eyesight failing, he wanted to stop painting and return to verse – and to do so, he needed his notebook back.

On a cold evening in 1869, gravediggers exhumed the body and retrieved the poetry

To Rossetti’s dismay, one poem he particularly wanted to re-use had a large worm hole through the middle.

• Elizabeth Siddal: Her Story. By Jan Marsh, Pallas Athene £17.99