Lizzie Siddal

by Lucinda Hawksley

  In spite of persuading her to make changes to her name and her career – by teaching her and helping her to be recognized as an artist – the contrary side to Dante Rossetti did not allow him to introduce Lizzie to his family because he wanted this love to be complicated and painful. He wanted it to inspire him as the painful desire for Beatrice Portinari had inspired his namesake.

  Although she was not allowed to become a part of his family, Lizzie was ever present in Rossetti’s life – once he had started to draw and paint her, he could not stop. Despite her jealousy and dislike of Lizzie, Christina was also fascinated by the woman who had gained such a hold over her brother. At Christmas 1856, after visiting Rossetti at his home in Blackfriars, where the walls were covered in sketches and paintings of Lizzie, Christina wrote a poem about his obsession:

  In An Artist’s Studio

  One face looks out from all his canvases,

  One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:

  We found her hidden just behind those screens,

  That mirror gave back all her loveliness.

  A queen in opal or in ruby dress,

  A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,

  A saint an angel – every canvas means

  The same one meaning, neither more nor less.

  He feeds upon her face by day and night,

  And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,

  Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:

  Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;

  Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;

  Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

  Her image may have adorned almost every inch of Dante’s walls, keeping her within his gaze even in her absence, yet in the words of his sister, four years before Rossetti eventually married her, Lizzie had already grown “wan with waiting”. Even Christina felt pity for Lizzie’s very female nineteenth-century predicament of being wasted by not being married. The real Lizzie was not a favourite with Christina, but her painted image nonetheless inspired the poet. The words “Not as she is, but as she fills his dream” emphasize Rossetti’s Alighieri-like desire to keep his Beatrice a vision of something she is not. Christina believed she could see the “true” Lizzie, a side of her of which Rossetti continued – by choice – to be in ignorance.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Painting the Dream

  The year 1850 was an important one in the Pre-Raphaelites’ calendar: the Poet Laureate, William Wordsworth, died and his successor was named as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, one of the PRB’s “immortals”. It was also the year in which Dante Rossetti painted Lizzie Siddal for the first time. The result was a small watercolour entitled Rossovestita. The picture was exhibited at the Old Water Colour Society in November 1852 and later given as a gift to Ford Madox Brown. There is some dispute that Lizzie was the model for Rossovestita, as it is not a great likeness of her, but Pre-Raphaelite legend is insistent it was Rossetti’s first painting of her. William Holman Hunt also painted Lizzie in 1850, using her as one of several central figures for his striking composition, A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Priest from the Persecution of the Druids.20 Lizzie is not the most central figure in this painting, although she is prominent. The central figure is the gentle-looking, Christ-like priest; Lizzie stands at his left side, holding a bowl and cloth with which to clean his wounds. The painting was one of the first to demonstrate the Pre-Raphaelites’ new-found technique of painting on a “wet-white ground”. The artist would prepare his canvas by covering it with a specially mixed white paint before beginning the picture. This white background added luminosity to the colours and allowed the artists to create such glowing tones as those seen in the face of Holman Hunt’s priest. The picture is now considered a masterpiece, but at the time it was criticized as ferociously as Deverell’s Twelfth Night, and for the same inartistic reasons. At the 1850 Royal Academy exhibition, it was blighted not only by its “PRB” connection, but also for complaints of there being too much nudity in the picture.21

  Despite this setback, Holman Hunt painted Lizzie again, and more famously, in 1850–1, as Sylvia for his Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus, a subject taken from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona. Although there are four figures in the painting, Lizzie’s face is almost directly in the centre and it is she who draws the eye. Wearing an elaborate silk dress, with her hair drawn back and fully revealing her face, she is the most striking element in the picture; even though she is kneeling down, her face is still in the centre of the composition, suggesting that Holman Hunt composed the painting’s other elements around her features. The additional three figures are dressed in darker, autumnal colours, in keeping with the woodland background, but Sylvia’s silver-and-white embroidered dress stands out dramatically. It is apparent from this painting and its careful composition that Holman Hunt felt as drawn to Lizzie’s face as Deverell and Rossetti were.

  In 1904, when Georgiana Burne-Jones wrote the memoirs of her husband Edward Burne-Jones’s life, she recalled meeting up with an unnamed woman22 who had once been one of the Pre-Raphaelites’ favoured models:

  Her regard for [the Pre-Raphaelites] … was still fresh and she loved to dwell on their memory. “I never saw such men,” she said; “it was being in a new world to be with them. I sat to them and was there with them, and they were different to everyone else I ever saw. And I was a holy thing to them – I was a holy thing to them.”

  How intoxicating to be made to feel this way, to be praised as a muse without whom there would be no painting. There is no question that when Lizzie first worked for them these remarkable young men made her feel equally idolized, or that her early days of modelling were some of the happiest times of her life. The Pre-Raphaelites, so different from most of the men of her acquaintance, did not look upon her as a lowly shop girl but deified her as a possessor of rare beauty, “a holy thing”. Once she had entered this world, how very difficult it would be ever to go back to the life she had known before.

  Lizzie was not, however, to remain Holman Hunt’s favourite model for long, because 1850 was the year in which he picked up a young stunner of his own, named Annie Miller. It was at this time that Lizzie’s world started to darken – after just a few months of such unexpected and unalloyed happiness. Annie was most definitely a working-class girl, with no illusions of being otherwise. She was gorgeous, sexy, entirely at ease with her sexuality and willing to use it to get whatever she wanted. Like Professor Higgins, Holman Hunt misinterpreted his lust as a genuine desire to do good and set about the long process of educating and grooming Annie until she was “suitable” for him to marry. After four years of slow courtship and delay, he then set off for the Middle East for two years, expecting her to stay patiently at home and learn her lessons, waiting chastely for his return. He was to be sorely disappointed.

  Between Lizzie and Annie there was antipathy at first sight. Lizzie, grown accustomed to being adored and petted by the group as a whole, suddenly had to make way for a woman with whom she would never have dreamt of associating previously. Had her parents known she was consorting with a woman such as Annie Miller, they would have been furious. Annie was not a wide-eyed innocent like Lizzie. She was earthy, mature beyond her years and malicious, taking obvious delight in Lizzie’s misery (though it is a fair presumption that both women were equally unpleasant to one another). Whether it was genuine foresight or simply unintelligent jealousy, Lizzie was wise to distrust Rossetti to be around Annie Miller.

  Lizzie was also working up another reason to dislike Holman Hunt, of whom she had at first been in awe. This dislike of him was largely irrational, blown up out of all proportion and related not just to Annie Miller but also to his closeness to Rossetti. In the early days, Rossetti looked up to Holman Hunt as a mentor. The latter had been his teacher for a while and he was a superbly original painter, very much worthy of Rossetti’s admiration. The way he could so easily command Rossetti’s loyalty represented another severe threat
to Lizzie’s potential happiness, especially with Hunt’s desire to go travelling to remote parts of the globe.

  Lizzie’s additional reason for disliking Holman Hunt began in September 1850 when Holman Hunt, Fred Stephens and Lizzie paid a visit to a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, Jack Tupper, and his aged father, who was known affectionately as “The Baron”. Jack was the brother of George Tupper, an artist and early contributor to and important financial backer of The Germ. For whatever reason, it was decided to play a joke upon the Tuppers by having Holman Hunt pretend Lizzie was his wife. The reason for this joke and its result have been lost in history – all that remains is an angry letter written by Dante Rossetti to his brother William in which he describes it as a “disgraceful hoax” and relates how he made Holman Hunt write a letter of apology to the Tuppers.23 Rossetti’s anger had more to do with jealousy because Holman Hunt had publicly claimed Lizzie as his own, rather than with his professed fury at Holman Hunt and Stephens being rude to a friend. (Rossetti’s own manners were not usually notable for being overtly correct.) Lizzie was quick to make use of this potential rift and swiftly decided that she was also furious with Holman Hunt. Her early fondness for him began to fade – leaving the latter reeling as he had no idea why – and, with a strange rapidity, became replaced by passionate dislike. Although some biographers dispute that Rossetti and Lizzie had become romantically involved as early as 1850, Holman Hunt’s letter of apology to the Tuppers makes it explicit. Included with the letter was a sketch. It shows a chastened-looking bearded man – Holman Hunt himself – who is holding a handkerchief to his eyes. Fred Stephens is depicted rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand, as though wiping away tears. Below them is a sketch of a starry-eyed couple, identifiable as Rossetti and Lizzie, drifting languidly in a boat beneath a romantic crescent moon.

  Later biographers of Lizzie claim it was the incident at the Tuppers’ home that soured the relationship between her and Holman Hunt, though precisely why it upset her so much is not related. She was, it seems, content to go along with the joke at the start, but there is always the possibility that he sprang it on her, that she had not had any idea of what he intended to do and was therefore dismayed and embarrassed when he introduced her as his wife, and was uncertain of how to get out of the deception. Perhaps she worried that the Tuppers – and Rossetti – might think she was cheap for having been willing to pretend to be married to a man she barely knew. Or maybe she felt the joke had been aimed at her and that Holman Hunt was being particularly cruel in intention – Lizzie could be highly over-sensitive and Holman Hunt could be thoughtless and brusque. Rossetti’s reaction to the joke made matters worse because it was obvious that one of the reasons he was cross was because he was worried the Tuppers would be offended when they learned that Holman Hunt’s supposed wife was actually a mere model and shop girl. His reaction, although defensive of her, also led her to the humiliating realization that she had not been accepted as one of the group, but would always be seen as an outsider, a parvenue from a lower class who could never quite be accepted as an equal.

  Unable to sever all contact with Holman Hunt and Annie Miller, as she would have liked, Lizzie was forced to suppress any overt displays of dislike, reserving her anger for the occasional outburst. She was beginning, instead, to show a cold, haughty side the group had not previously experienced. In October 1850, while Holman Hunt was using both Annie and Lizzie as models, he and several other Pre-Raphaelites decided to spend a weekend in the country to allow them to paint in the natural light and for Holman Hunt to be able to work his background for Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus from nature. The venue was decided on and the plans laid: they would visit Knole Country Park, near Sevenoaks in Kent, where Rossetti and Holman Hunt had already spent time painting. It would be a weekend of “picnics and painting real girls under real trees”, the artists and their models would all go – and there came the sticking point. When Lizzie discovered Annie was to be included in the party, she absolutely refused to attend. No amount of persuasion was effective and she stayed behind in London while a furious Gabriel, an irritated Holman Hunt and a triumphant Annie Miller joined the rest of the group.24

  Playing the waiting game alone in London was agonizing: Rossetti had not capitulated and stayed with her, as Lizzie had expected, and she was terrified Annie’s very obvious charms would work on him as effectively as they had on the smitten Holman Hunt. In the end, however, she had the satisfaction of welcoming back a thoroughly dejected party. The weather had been appalling, it had rained and been utterly cold and miserable; painting had been impossible, Annie had been soaked and had looked distinctly unappealing to the painterly eye; the light had been all wrong and the intended hearty picnics in the sunshine had been impossible.

  The smugness Lizzie felt over this ill-fated jaunt was to be emulated by Annie in a few months’ time. Although Valentine Rescuing Sylvia was to prove very popular at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition of 1851, where it sold for £200, its first exhibition at the Royal Academy was far less successful. Here it was caught up in the aftermath of the anti-Pre-Raphaelite storm that had so blighted Deverell’s picture and Holman Hunt’s own Druids painting the year before. The fact that this furious storm was still raging was instrumental in earning the Pre-Raphaelites one very valuable supporter: the overweening criticism of such genuinely talented painters brought the celebrated writer John Ruskin into the fray, to speak up on their behalf. A respected critic, Ruskin had been growing increasingly interested in the Pre-Raphaelites, both personally and professionally, and was moved to defend them against the barrage of journalistic vituperation. The artists had even been criticized by Charles Dickens – a dangerous opponent in a world full of people who seemed willing to believe that his word was almost the stuff of gospel.25

  To counteract Dickens’s influence, the Pre-Raphaelites were in desperate need of an equally influential supporter. Fortuitously, Ruskin could no longer tolerate this one-sided argument and in 1851 began publicly declaring his support for the Pre-Raphaelites. Part of that support involved him writing two famous letters to The Times in which he extolled the virtues of the group and put forward an alternative, favourable opinion of their works. He had not met Lizzie at this point and it was unfortunate that his only criticism of Valentine Rescuing Sylvia was about Sylvia herself: he lamented “the commonness of feature” and “unfortunate type chosen for the face of Sylvia”, a criticism which seems unfair. The painting shows Sylvia as a pretty, pensive girl with delicate and finely formed features; it is certainly the most flattering view of Lizzie of all the non-Rossetti oil paintings she modelled for. By now, with three of the paintings she had posed for so publicly humiliated and even her own looks criticized in The Times, Lizzie felt that her dreams of artistic fame were coming to nothing and queried her wisdom in ever choosing to enter this cut-throat world. Annie Miller was delighted.

  The unfortunate incidents of 1850 and 1851 were, however, to be forgotten as Lizzie prepared to sit for what has become considered one of the most important of all Pre-Raphaelite works. It was to be another Shakespearian scene, this time taken from Hamlet. In John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1852), the artist chose to depict the scene in which Ophelia, driven mad by Hamlet’s rejection, gathers flowers for her own bridal/funeral wreath and drowns herself in the river, having strewn the flowers all around her. In 1899, John Guille Millais, son of the artist, recorded the following:

  Miss Siddal had a trying experience whilst acting as a model for Ophelia. In order that the artist might get the proper set of the garments in water and the right atmosphere and aqueous effects, she had to lie in a large bath filled with water, which was kept at an even temperature by lamps placed beneath. One day, just as the picture was nearly finished, the lamps went out unnoticed by the artist who was so intensely absorbed in his work that he thought of nothing else, and the poor lady was kept floating in the cold water till she was quite benumbed. She herself never complained of this, but the result was that she c
ontracted a severe cold, and her father wrote to Millais, threatening him with an action for £50 for his carelessness. Eventually the matter was satisfactorily compromised. Millais paid the doctor’s bill; and Miss Siddal, quickly recovering, was none the worse for her cold bath.

  It is said that Millais’s mother had devised the heating system for the bath; an ingenious invention, if it had been properly attended to. The perfect model, Lizzie did not risk speaking or moving to draw Millais’s attention to the fact that the lamps had gone out; she just lay there and suffered for his art. No wonder she was so much in demand – she placed the Pre-Raphaelites’ work far above her own needs. She was a willing martyr to the cause in which they all believed so passionately. It is noteworthy that it was shortly after this incident that Lizzie’s poor health came to the fore in Rossetti’s correspondence and, from this time onward, it remained a permanent theme.

  In order to set the historic scene, Millais had found an antique wedding dress for Lizzie to wear, which billowed out around her in the bathwater, adding dramatic shape and tension. In the finished painting – which William Rossetti described as being more like Lizzie than any other picture – Ophelia appears to have expired very recently. Her skin is starting to lose its bloom and her eyes seem only just to have relinquished their vision. It is a powerfully haunting painting which, even today, regularly attracts large crowds of observers at London’s Tate Britain. It is the best known image of Lizzie – and one that is remarkably apt for a woman whose life ended so sadly and not so very differently from that of Shakespeare’s doomed heroine.

  At around this time Lizzie was in mourning, following the unexpected death of her eldest brother, Charles. Her wages were suddenly even more important than before as Charles had been one of the Siddall family’s major wage earners and his death placed the family in a difficult financial position. In anticipation of the modelling fee, she suppressed her dislike of Holman Hunt and sat for him again. Both she and Christina Rossetti were tried out as models for the face of Jesus in The Light of the World. Hunt used many models – male and female – trying to find exactly the right expression for Jesus. In the end it was Lizzie’s hair – the supposedly unlucky red hair – that was chosen to frame Christ’s face. Her churchgoing parents must have been proud – and no doubt even her father was a little mollified after his horror at her choice of career.