Elizabeth Siddal
Model, poet and artist in her own right.
Elizabeth Siddal is best known as the model for Millais's Ophelia and as Rossetti's wife, but she was also an artist and poet, and Ruskin gave her an annual allowance so that she could work. She died aged only 32.
Elizabeth Siddal was born in London in 1829 into a family of tradespeople and shopkeepers. She had no artistic training as a child, but she read poetry and wrote poems of her own. As a young woman she worked in a milliner's shop, where around 1849 she was discovered by the painter Walter Deverell, who asked her to sit for him.
She soon became one of the Pre-Raphaelite artists' most important models. She is most famous as the drowning Ophelia in John Everett Millais's painting of 1851–52, now in Tate Britain. According to the well-known story, she lay in a bath of water that was meant to be kept warm by lamps, and she fell ill when they went out.
In the 1850s she began a relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who drew and painted her hundreds of times and taught her to paint. She herself made small watercolours and drawings with subjects from medieval ballads, Tennyson and Dante, with angular figures and strong colours. John Ruskin admired her work and from 1855 gave her an annual allowance in exchange for it. In 1857 she was the only woman to exhibit at the Pre-Raphaelites' joint exhibition in London. One of her watercolours is in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
Her health was always poor, and she took laudanum, an opium preparation. She and Rossetti married in 1860. The following year she gave birth to a stillborn daughter, and in 1862 she died of a laudanum overdose, aged 32. Whether it was an accident or suicide is disputed. Rossetti placed a manuscript of his poems in her coffin but had it exhumed a few years later.
For a long time Siddal was seen merely as a tragic muse. Since the 1970s scholars and exhibitions, including one at Tate Britain, have brought her to the fore as an artist and poet in her own right.