Lizzie Siddal

by Lucinda Hawksley

  The group’s ideals were a secret intended to be known solely by the seven members, although very honoured friends, such as Ford Madox Brown (1821–93), Walter Deverell and Charles Allston Collins (1828–73), were often present at, and involved in, their discussions. The group was sworn to secrecy and marked their allegiance only by the presence of three little letters, “PRB”, painted on to their canvases. There was mild speculation about what this could mean, but no one had made any great attempt to find out. In 1850, however, just as Twelfth Night and several other Pre-Raphaelite paintings were to be exhibited, the secret was betrayed. The sculptor Alexander Munro (1825–71) was a close friend of the group. During an animated discussion, Dante Rossetti revealed to him, in strictest confidence, the significance of the letters “PRB”. Munro, perhaps in ignorance of the identity of the man to whom he was speaking and filled with excitement at this revolutionary society created by his friends, told a journalist what Rossetti had divulged to him. The story hit the papers and a scandal of breathtaking fury ensued.

  The idea that a group of such very young men, most of them barely out of their teens, was arrogant enough to suggest it knew more about art than such luminaries as Sir Joshua Reynolds (whom the Pre-Raphaelites had dubbed “Sir Sloshua”), Thomas Gainsborough or Raphael himself, appalled the critics, and journalists were suddenly extremely harsh. Brotherhood members, including John Millais and William Holman Hunt, who had been so lauded for their works the previous year, were now destroyed in print. Deverell, known to be an intimate of the group, could not escape unscathed. It was an extremely difficult time and responsible for the failing of more than one artistic career – if their works were not bought, the majority of artists could not afford to keep on painting and, for a while, any painting that seemed to have even a hint of the Pre-Raphaelite about it was reviled, regardless of whether or not the artist had any connection with the group. Not every critic was so harsh, however, and Deverell’s picture did receive an occasional favourable review. An article in the magazine Critic, published in July 1850, described Twelfth Night in the following words:

  The head of Viola is beautifully intended, but not physically beautiful enough, owing, as we fancy, to inadequate execution; and her position is in perfect accordance and subordination to the pervading idea … Mr Deverell has here, for the first time in a form at all conspicuous, entered on art boldly and with credit to himself; his faults are those of youth, and his beauties will doubtless mature into the resources of a true artist.

  By the time Deverell’s painting was ready to exhibit, his friends had all heard his many raptures over Viola, the new “Stunner”, with whom it was apparent he was more than a little infatuated. Holman Hunt later wrote an account of the first time he heard about Lizzie Siddall:

  Rossetti at that date had the habit of coming to me with a drawing folio, and sitting with it designing while I was painting at a further part of the room … Deverell broke in upon our peaceful labours. He had not been seated many minutes, talking in a somewhat absent manner, when he bounded up, marching, or rather dancing to and fro about the room, and, stopping emphatically, he whispered, “You fellows can’t tell what a stupendously beautiful creature I have found. By Jove! She’s like a queen, magnificently tall, with a lovely figure, a stately neck, and a face of the most delicate and finished modelling; the flow of surface from the temples over the cheek is exactly like the carving of a Phidean goddess … I got my mother to persuade the miraculous creature to sit for me for my Viola in ‘Twelfth Night’, and to-day I have been trying to paint her; but I have made a mess of my beginning. Tomorrow she’s coming again; you two should come down and see her; she’s really a wonder; for while her friends, of course, are quite humble, she behaves like a real lady, by clear commonsense, and without any affectation, knowing perfectly, too, how to keep people respectful at a distance.”

  Eager to see this paragon, most of the Pre-Raphaelites hurried to Deverell’s studio to glimpse her as she was being painted, and several were eager for her to sit for them, too. Rossetti, never one to be concerned about encroaching on a friend’s territory, asked her to sit for him on her second day at Deverell’s studio and Holman Hunt wrote to her almost immediately afterward, asking that she model for him also. He had not even seen her, but was convinced that she was the right model for him, based on Deverell’s and Rossetti’s ecstatic accounts of her. It was a mesmerizing time for Lizzie. A hitherto unrealized world was opening up in front of her, offering a life that need not follow the much-trodden rut she had previously assumed it would. She had a new, unusual and quite lucrative career that was taking off with a passion; her life would never be the same again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Dante and Beatrice

  Lizzie met Dante Gabriel Rossetti for the first time in the winter of 1849–50. At the time Lizzie and Deverell were attracted to one another, but Deverell knew he could not have a relationship with a woman his family would never approve of him marrying and he was too kind to attempt to seduce Lizzie and not marry her. She was not a streetwalker or the usual coarse model; she was fervently respectable, desperate to be acceptable and, most important, she trusted him. Rossetti, believing himself unbound by social rigidity, was ready for an unconventional and life-changing passion. By 1851, Deverell was out of the frame, whether he liked it or not, and Rossetti and Lizzie were recognized by their friends as a couple. Lizzie quickly became Rossetti’s main – at times, only – source of inspiration. Their courtship was to continue, sometimes passionate and wonderful, at other times limping sickeningly, until their belated marriage in 1860, by which time Lizzie was so ill, it was uncertain whether she would live long enough to make it to the church.

  Rossetti, a year older than Lizzie, was born on May 12, 1828; the second of four children, two boys and two girls, born to Gabriele and Frances (née Polidori) Rossetti. He was christened Charles Gabriel Dante Rossetti, but due to his adoration of the medieval Florentine poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) he changed the order of his names in his late teens and recreated himself as Dante Gabriel Rossetti (losing the more prosaic Charles entirely).15 The Pre-Raphaelites always called him Gabriel, but he preferred the name Dante. Fluent in Italian, he translated Alighieri’s poetry into English and spent his life recreating scenes from Alighieri’s work in paintings.

  Rossetti came to identify strongly with his hero, in particular with the poet’s early and enduring passion for a girl named Beatrice, about whom much of his poetry revolved. Enchanted by this story of impossible love, the agony it caused and the creativity it inspired, Rossetti became obsessed by an ideal that the only true love was one that caused pain – but such an exquisite pain that it could be channelled into the world’s greatest artistic works.

  Dante Alighieri and Beatrice Portinari were just children when they met, but he decided at once that he loved her. He remained adoring throughout adolescence, although he was so shy and hid his feelings so well she had no idea of the emotions she had engendered. So worried was Dante that someone would discover his secret that he went to elaborate lengths to hide his feelings by pretending to be in love with a woman of Beatrice’s acquaintance and, when she left town, then pretending to have fallen for someone else. Beatrice believed him to be a flirt and to be insincere; she had no suspicion that she was the true object of his adoration. When she was 15, Beatrice’s parents arranged her marriage to a suitable nobleman, Simone de Bardi. Although Dante himself had been betrothed at the age of 12, to Gemma Donati (whom he married in 1285, four or five years after Beatrice’s wedding), he had not yet given up hope of being with Beatrice – until her wedding foretold the end of his dreams. Dante was so desperately unhappy that, when he saw Beatrice on her wedding day, he had to turn his head away from her so she could not see his tears. Having no idea how he felt, Beatrice believed he was insulting her and refused to acknowledge him again.

  Unable to express his love of another man’s wife, Dante turned his emotions inward, dreaming of Beatrice and willingly
allowing her to haunt every waking and sleeping moment. One night he had a dream of a winged figure, named Amor: the dream showed Amor taking Dante’s heart and giving it to Beatrice, the rightful owner, telling Dante to use his love for Beatrice to write poetry. Dante also had a prophetic vision about Beatrice: when he was ill and feverish, he had a dream about her dying at a young age and becoming an angel. Beatrice did die, very suddenly, in 1290. She was 24 or 25 years old at her death. Despite being married to Gemma, Dante was distraught by the death of the woman he truly loved. His love had been unconsummated and unrequited, but instead of diminishing with the years had grown stronger.

  After her death, Dante turned Beatrice into a saintly figure. She became the inspiration for some of Italy’s most famous poetry, Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia). Vita Nuova, which means “new life” and refers to a life renewed by love, is the story of his passion for Beatrice, beginning with their first meeting, when she was just eight or nine years old. Beatrice also appears in The Divine Comedy, an epic in which Dante travels through heaven and hell and in which she is his guiding angel. Although Gemma bore Dante several sons and remained married to him for many years, his name has become inextricably connected with Beatrice, the wife of another man. Gemma Alighieri is barely ever remembered.

  Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a deeply romantic figure to whom many aspects of Alighieri’s story appealed. Although born and raised in London, he clung proudly to his parents’ Italian roots and identified his father’s exile from Italy, for his political views, with Alighieri’s fourteenth-century exile from the city state of Florence, also because of political allegiances. Rossetti became obsessed with the idea of Dante and Beatrice and, from the time he met Lizzie, identified her strongly with Beatrice. After Lizzie’s death, she was no longer his troublesome, flawed wife. Instead she became a beatified beauty, who would never grow old, like Beatrice. A disproportionately large number of Rossetti’s paintings were born out of the poetry of Dante Alighieri; in later life it was not always Lizzie who was painted as Beatrice, although she is without doubt the strongest presence in his Alighieri-inspired works.

  Rossetti, in his youth, was deeply attractive, with flowing black curls and intense, seductive eyes. Georgiana Burne-Jones, wife of Edward Burne-Jones, later recalled, “no one could reproduce the peculiar charm of his voice with its sonorous roll and beautiful cadences”. In later years he became portly and grotesque and the eyes which had held such depth now appeared to hold a look of insanity. Towards the end of his life he fought a constant battle with depression, chloral addiction and severe mental illness, but in his youth, when he first met Lizzie Siddall, he breathed passion, raw vitality and excitement into every gathering. At this period, he did not drink alcohol, neither did he smoke – he appears to have had enough natural adrenalin to negate the need for any artificial stimulants.16 There was something mesmerizing about him, a quality that attracted men and women to love, admire or want to emulate him. The painter Valentine Prinsep (1838–1904) was a minor Pre-Raphaelite, an admirer of their works and a member of the younger circle who longed to be a part of the group. He described his mentor in the following way: “Rossetti was the planet round which we revolved … we copied his very way of speaking. All beautiful women were ‘stunners’ with us. Wombats were the most delightful of God’s creatures. Mediaevalism was our beau idéal and we sank our own individuality in the strong personality of our adored Gabriel.”17

  Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829–1925),18 a close friend of both Rossetti and Lizzie, wrote the following description of him in 1854, “He is slim Italian; English born and bred, but a son of Italy on both sides of the house – short, dark hair, lighter eyes, a little moustache and beard; very gentlemanly, even tender in manner; with a sweet mellow voice.” The Victorian poet Coventry Patmore (1823–96), most famous for his poem “The Angel in the House”, also knew the Pre-Raphaelites when they were young. He was an admirer of their art and a contributor to The Germ. In his memoirs he wrote: “Rossetti was in manners, mind, and appearance completely Italian. He had very little knowledge of or sympathy with English Literature; and always gave me the impression of tensity rather than intensity.”

  Not only was Lizzie as equally “tense”, or nervously inclined, as Dante Rossetti, but both were headstrong and wilful; they were also both depressive; prone to wild mood swings, ranging from the elevated to the depressed; had a tendency to addiction and shared a destructively jealous need to be the most important figure in their – or, indeed, any – relationship. When they were in love and happy, they were deliriously so, not needing anyone else and perfectly content to stay cocooned together in Rossetti’s rooms for days at a time. When one – or both – of them was unhappy, ill, depressed or jealous, they made one another’s lives hellish. Throughout the nine long years of their strange courtship, they tested each other’s patience and trust to the limits. Self-destructive and self-loathing at times, as well as being arrogant about their abilities, both must have been extremely difficult to live with.

  The first indication we have of the quite cloying nature of their affection for one another is in 1851, when Holman Hunt proposed making a painting trip to Syria. Rossetti expressed a wish to go with him and Lizzie was desperate at the idea that he might leave her.

  Holman Hunt was a fervent believer in the powers of natural light: he would paint outside in all temperatures, weather and seasons in order to recreate the most realistic light conditions for his paintings. When he painted his famous The Light of the World (1853, now in St Paul’s Cathedral), he slept by day and painted in his garden at night in order to be able to capture the true essence of moonlight and lantern-light.19 His desire for painting in the open air led him all over the world in a quest to seek out different light forms, subtleties and strengths. He grew especially fond of the Middle East, through which he travelled extensively.

  Holman Hunt’s passion to experience other lands, cultures and art was seductive and Millais and Rossetti were among several artists who pledged to travel with him, although when Holman Hunt finally set out on a big trip to the Middle East – in 1854 – neither of them accompanied him.

  In 1851, when the possibility of such a voyage was first mentioned, Christina Rossetti wrote a sulky letter, commenting that her brother would never go to Syria because he was too “ensnared” by Lizzie. Christina had not yet met her future sister-in-law – they were not introduced until 1854 – but she was already convinced this unknown woman was unworthy of her brother. To Christina’s mind, no doubt encouraged by William’s unfavourable opinion, Lizzie was merely a common model from the Old Kent Road, no matter how grand her pretensions. Annoyingly, however, this common model was also proving a challenging, and often unbeatable, rival for Christina’s brother’s affections.

  This petulant impression was largely the fault of Rossetti himself who, despite telling everyone how wonderful “Miss Sid” was, did not introduce her to his mother until 1855. Neither did he introduce her to his friends outside the immediate Pre-Raphaelite circle. Despite his anti-establishment stance where art was concerned, in other areas of his life Rossetti was more conventional than he would have liked to believe. He was embarrassed by the financial differences between his and Lizzie’s families and the gulf between their social circles, yet he could not help himself falling in love with her. Perhaps he also kept her separate from the other areas of his life in an attempt not to lose his ideals: in his mind Lizzie had become the adored one, the Beatrice to his Dante, a woman with no flaws; by introducing her to his family and friends she would have left thirteenth-century Florence and been rooted very firmly in nineteenth-century London.

  Lizzie was unlike the women he had met before, far removed from his often suffocatingly conventional sisters, Christina and Maria, and a world away from the whores with whom he joked on the streets and wished he had the courage to approach properly. Lizzie was of a lower social class, yet with an image of herself as his social superior – she did not introduce h
im to her family because her parents would never approve of an artist, or an Italian (the first time Lizzie took Rosetti home was in 1855). She also dressed very differently from other women, wearing floating, unstructured dresses without a corset, the style that has come to be known as Pre-Raphaelite. Although it is usually assumed that the PRB invented the medieval-influenced style that later became fashionable wear for women, Lizzie was renowned for her own very individual and elegant style. Her sartorial sense was as much of an influence on Rossetti as his eye for colour and fabric was on her. Georgiana Burne-Jones described Lizzie’s style c. 1860: “[her] slender, elegant figure – tall for those days … – comes back to me in a graceful and simple dress, the incarnate opposite of the ‘tailor-made’ young lady …”

  When he fell in love with her, Rossetti wanted to “improve” Lizzie, to make her more worthy of being his companion. One of the first things he did was to persuade her to change the way she spelt her surname. He convinced her that “Siddal” looked more genteel than “Siddall”, so Lizzie changed it permanently. This belief was one she passed on to her family. Her father, in yet another effort to establish his eligibility for his ancestral home, followed suit for a while: in the census of 1851, the family at 8 Kent Place is listed as “Siddal”. However, he changed the spelling back again quite rapidly.