Элизабет Сиддал: Муза прерафаэлитов и трагическая судьба художницы и поэтессы.

Pre Raphaelite model, artist, and poet (1829–1862)

Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (25 July 1829 – 11 February 1862), better known as Elizabeth Siddal (a spelling she adopted in 1853), was an English artist, art model, and poet. Siddal was perhaps the most significant of the female models who posed for the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood. Their ideas of female beauty were fundamentally influenced and personified by her. Walter Deverell and William Holman Hunt painted Siddal, and she was the model for John Everett Millais's famous painting Ophelia (1852). Early in her relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Siddal became his muse and exclusive model, and he portrayed her in almost all his early artwork depicting women. Siddal became an artist in her own right and was the only woman to exhibit at an 1857 Pre Raphaelite exhibition. Significant collections of her artworks can be found at Wightwick Manor and the Ashmolean Museum. Sickly and melancholic during the last decade of her life, Siddal died of a laudanum overdose in 1862 during her second year of marriage to Rossetti.

Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, named after her mother, was born on 25 July 1829, at the family's home at 7Charles Street, Hatton Garden, at the time in the parish of Saffron Hill, Hatton Garden, Ely Rents and Ely Place in central London. Her parents were Charles Crooke Siddall, and Elizabeth Eleanor Evans, from a family of English and Welsh descent. She had two older siblings, Ann and Charles Robert. At the time of her birth, her father had a cutlery making business. About 1831, the Siddall family moved to the less affluent borough of Southwark, in south London. The remainder of the Siddall children were born in Southwark: Lydia, to whom she was particularly close; Mary, Clara, James and Henry. Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall "received an ordinary education, conformable to her condition in life" and first "read Tennyson by finding one or two poems of his on a piece of paper" that had been wrapped around some butter. Literary analysts have noted that her artwork sometimes used subjects from Tennyson's writings and that his writings may have influenced her poetry.

In 1853, Siddal signed The Lady of Shalott as "E. E. Siddal", the first time she had signed one of her works and an early instance of her shortened surname. Siddal seems to have inspired Rossetti, as he followed her in depicting the same subjects, and he reused her designs after her death. From 1855 to 1857, art critic John Ruskin subsidised her career and paid £150 per year in exchange for all the drawings and paintings she produced. Unpublished during her lifetime, her poetry often dwelt on dark themes, lost love, or the impossibility of true love. Her small poetic output was nonetheless accomplished. Constance Hassett wrote that "Siddal's poetry ranges from the perfectly realized ballad narrative, to its opposite, the overheard lyric, and to something in between, the made to be heard monologue." Siddal had also become Rossetti's main model and muse, and he stopped her from modelling for others. In 1852, Siddal began to study with Rossetti. She started staying at his Chatham Place residence, sometimes with him and sometimes by herself. They subsequently became anti social and absorbed in each other's affections. They coined affectionate nicknames for one another, such as "Guggums" or "Gug" and "Dove", the latter one of Rossetti's names for Siddal. He also shortened the spelling of her surname to Siddal, dropping the second l.

During this period, Rossetti's most abundant and personal works were his pencil sketches of Siddal at home, most of which he entitled simply "Elizabeth Siddal". or when painting or drawing. She also became the subject of much of Rossetti's poetry throughout their relationship and particularly after her death. Rossetti became obsessive in portraying Siddal. It has been estimated that there are thousands of Rossetti's drawings, paintings, and poems in which Siddal was a subject. Beginning in 1853, Rossetti used Siddal as a model for a series of Dante themed paintings, including The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (1852), Beatrice Meeting Dante at a Marriage Feast, Denies him her Salutation (1851), Dante's Vision of Rachel and Leah (1855), and, perhaps his most famous portrait of her, Beata Beatrix (1864–1870), which he painted as a memorial after her death. her laudanum addiction, Rossetti's philandering, and little is known about Siddal from that time until 1860. In Spring 1860, Siddal's family contacted Ruskin with the news that Siddal was gravely ill. Ruskin in turn informed Rossetti. Siddal was at the seaside resort of Hastings. In a change of heart, Rossetti hurried to her side that April with a marriage license. Siddal and Rossetti married on Wednesday, 23 May 1860 at St. Clement's Church in Hastings. There were no family or friends present, only a couple of witnesses whom they had asked. When Siddal's health improved, they honeymooned in Paris and Boulogne in the latter half of 1860, She became severely depressed and her long illness gave her access to laudanum to which she became addicted. By 1861, Siddal became pregnant, which ended with the birth of a stillborn daughter. The stillbirth left Siddal with post partum depression. By early 1862, she had become pregnant for a second time. Siddal overdosed on laudanum on 10 February 1862. She, Rossetti, and his friend Algernon Charles Swinburne had dined together in a nearby hotel. After having taken Siddal home, Rossetti attended his weekly lecture at the Working Men's College. Upon returning home from teaching, Rossetti found Siddal unconscious in bed and could not revive her. The first doctor Rossetti called claimed that he was unable to save her, upon which Rossetti sent for another three doctors. A stomach pump was used, but to no avail. She died at 7:20am on 11 February 1862 at their home at 14 Chatham Place. Consumed with grief and guilt Rossetti allegedly went to see Ford Madox Brown who is supposed to have instructed him to burn the note. In August 1869, Rossetti authorized Charles Howell to disinter her coffin to retrieve a handwritten book of Rossetti's poems, which he had laid beside her head before burial. With the aid of a Dr. Llewelyn Williams and two others, Howell accomplished this in October 1869. Dr. Williams subsequently disinfected the book. Rossetti then published the contents in Poems (1870). These became part of Rossetti's sonnet sequence entitled The House of Life. This sequence contained the poem "Without Her", a reflection on life once love has departed.

Their home at 14 Chatham Place was demolished and is now covered by Blackfriars Station.

A retrospective of Siddal's work was curated by Jan Marsh in 1991 at the Ruskin Gallery in Sheffield. Rosalie Glynn Grylls bought some of Siddal's works at auction in 1961. These works became part of Wightwick Manor, donated by her husband, Geoffrey Mander, and her to the National Trust. A 2018 exhibition, "Beyond Ophelia", curated by National Trust Assistant Curator Hannah Squire, ran for nine months and featured twelve artworks by Siddal and owned by the National Trust. Only the second solo exhibition of her work, the exhibition examined Siddal's career, artistic style, subject matter, and the recognition challenges she faced as a female artist. Siddal was among the women featured in the 2019 Pre Raphaelite Sisters exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery. In 2023, the Tate Gallery has The Rossettis exhibition that includes 17 of Siddal's works.]] Writer and curator Jan Marsh wrote that those fascinated by Siddal included Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Symons. The artist and author Charles Ricketts confessed that "Oh, we have all, when young, been in love with Miss Siddal." With the emerging fields of psychology and sexology, a reevaluation of Siddal in fiction, poems, and biographies occurred in the 1920s and 1930s. She became regarded as "a morbid, hysterical, suicidal woman clinging to her virginity and angrily jealous of her rivals". By the mid twentieth century, perceptions had changed again so that Siddal became "a Pre Raphaelite groupie, a child of the 1950s and 60s pop culture." More recently, authors and biographers have reassessed Siddal. In this reexamination, she emerges as "partly a victim of masculine oppression and partly a rediscovered proto feminist", and a rediscovery that includes "a determined effort to detach Elizabeth Siddal's story from that of Rossetti and the PRB, and present her with a biography of her own." Along with Algernon Charles Swinburne, Siddal and Rossetti are the subjects of "How They Met Themselves", which is part of The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman, drawn by Michael Zulli, and published in Vertigo: Winter's Edge #3 (2000). In it, a dying Lizzie drugged with laudanum has a last dream or vision in which the trio takes a train trip to a forest "where they each would see their true love". This story bears the same title as a drawing and a painting by Rossetti that both depict Siddal.

Rossetti's relationship with Siddal has been the subject of television dramas, notably Dante's Inferno (1967), by Ken Russell, in which she was played by short=y and Rossetti by Oliver Reed; The Love School (1975) in which she was played by Patricia Quinn; and Desperate Romantics (2009) in which she was played by Amy Manson.

Siddal is depicted on one of the plates in the Famous Women Dinner Service by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, (1932–1934), commissioned by the art historian, Kenneth Clark. The Delaware Art Museum hosted a 2022 exhibit of Holly Trostle Brigham's works inspired by and portraying Siddal in conjunction with its Pre Raphaellite collection that includes works by and a Rossetti portrait of Siddal.