The time spent together in Hastings seemed to cement Rossetti’s feelings for Lizzie – perhaps he would impetuously have married her if he had not been in mourning. A letter to Allingham written on July 23 seems to suggest so:
It seems hard to me when I look at her sometimes, working or too ill to work, and think how many without one tithe of her genius or greatness of spirit have granted them abundant health and opportunity … while perhaps her soul is never to bloom nor her bright hair to fade … How truly she may say, “No man cared for my soul.” I do not mean to make myself an exception, for how long I have known her, and not thought of this till so late – perhaps too late. But … I fear, too, my writing at all about it must prevent your easily believing it to be, as it is, by far the nearest thing to my heart.
Unfortunately for Lizzie, long before Rossetti was out of mourning, the depth of his more noble feelings, and his desire to prove to her how much he cared for her soul, were easily suppressed.
At the end of July Lizzie was once again ill and depressed and Rossetti had to write to Ford and Emma Madox Brown to cancel a visit to them as Lizzie was too ill to move. Over the next few months she pined and fretted, fearful that she was losing Rossetti yet again. Meanwhile she painted pictures of tales of chivalry, illustrating stories by Sir Walter Scott and other balladeers about noble knights and their faithful ladies. Rossetti was once again embroiled in his hectic, exciting life, leaving her alone while he spent time with his disapproving family and the friends who thought of her solely as his mistress. He was neglectful, surrounded by the usual London distractions – including Annie Miller, left alone while Holman Hunt travelled in the Middle East.
Fate also decreed that the lovers’ cosy existence at Chatham Place had to come to a temporary end. All other concerns were put aside as Lizzie and Rossetti fled Blackfriars in fear of their lives as yet another cholera outbreak swept through London, particularly dangerous to those with homes on the river. Rossetti divided his time between staying with family and friends, while Lizzie stayed in rooms she had rented in a house at 1 Weymouth Street in central London, a short walk from Regent’s Park. The house was on the corner where Weymouth Street connects with Great Portland Street; it had a garden and her room looked out onto the branches of a large tree.50 It was unusual for a woman of her era and uncertain income to choose to rent a place of her own instead of living with her parents, but it is suggestive of the fact that she did not want her family to know the details of her relationship with Rossetti, especially when it concerned the amount of time she spent at his apartment. It is unclear how she supported herself in these new lodgings, but one must assume that Rossetti was paying for her new home, or else paying her a regular wage for modelling (of which no records have been discovered).
In October, when the cholera outbreak was in retreat, Ford Madox Brown called round at Rossetti’s studio, where he found Lizzie still very ill but submitting to being drawn again and again. She was too weak to apply herself to her own painting or poetry, but she had enough energy to sit motionless in a chair and be sketched and painted ad infinitum. Some of these pictures are sexual in undertone, others are sympathetic, but all show a huddled, frail figure sapped of energy and vitality. In one, she sleeps in an armchair, a huge pillow supporting her head, her hands crossed gently on her lap but with her spine characteristically erect, even in slumber. In another, she sits in the same chair, supporting her head with her right hand while her left holds a book, which she appears absorbed in reading. In a third, she stands by a window, her head tilted so she faces into the room, away from the sunlight. Her right hand is resting on the window-sill and her left hand supports her weight by grasping the arm of a nearby chair. In this drawing, Lizzie looks wan and sapped of energy; the position is forced and seems likely to have been the result of Rossetti visualizing a character in a genre painting. All the pictures seem to breathe a knowledge that the artist and sitter were intimately connected. In their construction is a tenderness and obvious sympathy for the plight of the model. By now Lizzie’s laudanum addiction was a constant companion in their relationship and these sketches make her pathetic physical state all too apparent.
Despite being such an invalid herself, Lizzie was surprisingly unsympathetic when Rossetti was ill and was apparently a very poor nurse. In 1853 Rossetti had been plagued by illness, including recurrent and painful boils, thrush and a severe reaction to the medicine prescribed to relieve his symptoms. He chose, however, not to allow Lizzie to nurse him. Instead, he travelled north to stay with his friend William Bell Scott in Newcastle (a place he hated and was very scathing of in letters home), hoping that the change of air would cure him. It did not, so after several sojourns into the countryside on his slow progression down south he returned uncured to London. He did not, however, choose to stay at Chatham Place where Lizzie had been sleeping and painting in his absence; instead he went back to his family so Maria could nurse him. It seems there was only room for one invalid in this love affair.
Lizzie’s first artistic triumph had taken place during the time that Rossetti was in Newcastle. This was before she rented her rooms in Weymouth Street, so the chance to live independently in Blackfriars was idyllic. Alone in Chatham Place, she thrived. With no one to disturb her, no sisters to share a bedroom with and no small brothers requiring attention, Lizzie could concentrate on her art. Not only did she have the luxury of time, she had all Rossetti’s art materials to hand, with no one else wanting to use them. Prior to this time she had been painting under the close instruction of Rossetti, with him guiding everything she created, but in his absence she chose to do something different from genre painting. Instead of recreating a scene from someone else’s imagination, she decided to take her art in a new direction and attempt to paint a self-portrait – and to paint it in oils. When Rossetti returned to the studio he was genuinely impressed by how good the oil painting was and suggested sending it to the Royal Academy for the Winter Exhibition (a plan that did not reach fruition). Around this time, Lizzie had also come up with designs to illustrate “St Agnes’ Eve”, a poem by Tennyson.51 Traditionally, on the eve of St Agnes’s Day (January 21) unmarried women performed certain ceremonies – including fasting before sleep – in the hope that they would dream that night of the man they were to marry. In John Keats’s famous poem “The Eve of St Agnes”, he tells the story of two lovers, fated by belonging to warring families, who sneak away together in the middle of the night. Although Lizzie could have illustrated Keats’s poem, by which she could have expressed her own desire for Rossetti to defy his family and marry her, she chose instead to illustrate Tennyson’s, in which a novice nun considers her life in the convent and her desire to be “married” to God. She contemplates life and death and her desire to be in heaven with her “Bridegroom”; the musings are similar to Lizzie’s own poetic contemplations. There are two reasons for Lizzie choosing to paint Tennyson’s version of the poem – in the hope that she might be chosen as an illustrator for future volumes of his work, but also because religious art sold well in the mid-1850s.
Towards the end of 1853, Lizzie was painting another popular poetic subject, one that had been painted by several Pre-Raphaelites, Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”. Lizzie planned to send it to the Royal Academy for the Summer Exhibition, although, as with Rossetti’s plans for her self-portrait, nothing came of this intention. Like “The Eve of St Agnes”, this poem had a special significance for Lizzie. It tells the story of a lady of Arthurian legend who fell in love with one of the Knights of the Round Table, Lancelot. Her love was not returned – Lancelot was too busy falling in love with Arthur’s queen, Guinevere – and she died of neglect and a broken heart.52 In the poem, the Lady is isolated in a tower on the island of Shalott. She is forbidden to look out of her window towards Camelot, and has been told that if she does so she will be cursed. The curse – although she does not know it – is unrequited love. She lives a simple life of weaving and observing the outside world by means of a mirror
placed opposite the window. The mirror reflects everything she has, until now, desired to see and she has never previously been tempted to look out of the window. Lizzie depicts the Lady at the pivotal moment of the poem, when she is weaving her “web” at the loom, she has caught sight of Lancelot for the first time in her mirror and impetuously turns to look out of the window to watch him as he rides towards forbidden Camelot:
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.
In Lizzie’s picture, the Lady is a demure, unruffled figure in the centre of the room, yet around her all is turning to chaos. Her weaving is unravelling in thousands of broken skeins, billowing out from the loom as though blown by a hurricane; the mirror has not simply cracked from side to side but is a mass of spidery breaks, and a cupboard door has flung open wildly. All that remains calm is a crucifix by the window and the Lady herself, who wears a pained smile – it shows recognition of what she has done but also an expression of stunned happiness in the first flush of love.
By the following spring, Lizzie had moved on from Keats and Tennyson to Wordsworth’s poetry, spending months creating and then reworking her design for We Are Seven. Although only a handful of her works remain, Lizzie produced many more pictures in her short life than those we know about. Some of her works are documented or photographed if they themselves do not survive, but many of them have been lost, destroyed or forgotten. Her other works include another illustration for “The Lady of Shalott”, in which the Lady is floating along the river in her boat on her way to death; a depiction of St Cecilia, the patron saint of music, in a pose not dissimilar to Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix; and a study of the Jewish martyr, Jephthah’s Daughter.53
Rossetti was always a fervent believer in Lizzie’s artistic ability – even when they were separated and barely on speaking terms, he remained convinced of the quality of her work and the depth of her talent. When she was first starting out and her pictures were not selling, he made every effort to reassure her that it was through the ignorance of the buyers, not through any defects of her own, and wrote a limerick to cheer her up:
There is a poor creature named Lizzy,
Whose pictures are dear at a tizzy;
And of this the great proof
Is that all stand aloof
From paying that sum unto Lizzy.
He knew, however, that no matter how strongly he believed in her and no matter how many poems he wrote her, he could not make the art world take her seriously. He recognized that Lizzie needed a more powerful ally, someone who could champion her cause more effectively and more influentially than he was able to do. Now that she had built up a reputable body of work – with the paintings she had made while he was in Newcastle, together with the works she had created throughout 1854 – she should have been able to make money from them, but he knew that being female meant Lizzie was even less likely to achieve success than the thousands of penniless male artists who filled London’s garrets. In order to achieve any measure of independence through art, Lizzie needed a patron.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rossetti and Ruskin
Dante Rossetti had met John Ruskin for the first time in April 1854. It was a meeting both men had been keen to secure and, despite what could have been insurmountable differences in personality, they became long-term friends. Rossetti’s mind was not wholly on art, however, at this first meeting. He was worrying about his father and about Lizzie, who was very ill and about to go to Hastings for her health. He hated it when she went away from him. Rossetti told Ruskin about his “pupil” and extolled her abilities as well as her beauty. His enthusiasm was infectious and Ruskin became fascinated with the idea of meeting Rossetti’s muse, as well as with seeing her paintings.
Rossetti’s comments to Ruskin were heartfelt, but he was not merely chatting disinterestedly. His comments were calculated to whet the appetite of the susceptible Ruskin – and his wiles were effective. As Rossetti wrote to Allingham that April, “I have told Ruskin of my pupil, and he yearneth.”
The year 1854 was John Ruskin’s annus horribilis. It was the year in which his wife, Effie, began a scandal-inducing court case to obtain an annulment of their marriage, as a result of which all sorts of whispers and jokes about him were to circulate in London. He sought solace in his work and craved reaffirmation of his abilities as a patron and critic of the arts, in lieu of receiving any commendation for his abilities as a husband or lover. He was also very much in need of friendship and kindness. Serendipitously, Rossetti appeared at exactly the right time to benefit himself and Lizzie.
John Ruskin was born in 1819, the only son of wealthy, doting parents who recognized his precocious abilities from a young age and fed them with a rich education and impressive foreign travel. His was a sheltered life and often quite a lonely childhood, with few friends of his own age. He was reluctant to marry until his parents engineered a courtship with a distant cousin, Miss Euphemia Gray, known as “Effie”. She was in her teens when they met for the first time and 20 years old when they married in 1848. She was naïve, sheltered and fully prepared to hero-worship her extremely clever and well-respected husband, who was nine years her senior. The reality of marriage, however, was vastly different from the ideal both these innocents had been hoping to achieve. Theirs was a troubled relationship, a mismarriage of minds and a jarring clash of ideals. For whatever reason, their marriage remained unconsummated – a decision of Ruskin’s that left Effie miserable and with an overwhelming sense of rejection. Not only was she deprived of love, she was also deprived of the chance to have children, which she desperately wanted.
There is no proof of the reason why Ruskin chose not to sleep with his wife. Biographers have suggested she was afraid on their wedding night and he never tried again, or that they did try and it was too painful for her, that he was only interested in very young girls or simply that he did not like sex.54 The most commonly held belief – based purely on supposition rather than fact – is that Ruskin, a fervent lover of art from a very young age, had never before seen a woman naked, except on canvas. He was therefore horrified to discover that his wife had pubic hair and thought she was deformed. Whatever the real reason, the Ruskins’ marriage remained sexless, as well as being mentally damaging to them both.
In 1852, an eager disciple of Ruskin’s requested permission to paint Effie. This keen young artist was John Everett Millais, whose career owed a great deal to Ruskin’s championship. He was painting The Order of Release, the story of a Highlander’s release from prison, where he had been held by the English army. His wife, barefoot, with a young baby slumbering in her arms and the Highlander’s dog as her escort, arrives at the gaol to hand over the order of release. The resigned, detached expression on her face and the way in which her husband hides his defeated face against her shoulder illustrates that both are aware of the price she paid to earn his release papers. The picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1853, and it earned a place in history books by being the first ever picture to require a bodyguard to protect it from the eager public.
In the summer of 1853, Millais and his brother William were invited to accompany the Ruskins on holiday to Effie’s native Scotland. Holman Hunt had been asked to join the party but had declined, wanting to remain near Annie Miller, who was already proving problematic. In Perthshire, John Millais intended to paint a portrait of the great art critic. Absorbed in his portrait, Millais often remained at the lodging house while the other men went out for the day. Much nearer in age and sympathy to Effie than her husband, Millais was captivated by Ruskin’s beautiful wife, who often came to chat to him while he was working, just as they had chatted when she had been modelling for The Order of Release. There had been a strong bond between them from the start and Effie had grown to trust him. That summer, unable to bear the suffocating situation any longer, she found herself revealing to Millais the sham that w
as her marriage. The ardent Pre-Raphaelite youth, weaned on the legends of King Arthur, chivalry and courtly love, was horrified by the misery of Effie’s life. Placed in the terrible position of admiring the husband and yet falling in love with the wife, who so desperately needed rescuing, Millais was in agonies. It was the most difficult situation his privileged life had ever beheld and it was one he did not enjoy resolving.
In April 1854, Effie left Ruskin. Under the pretence of visiting her parents for a short holiday, she returned to her family home, from where she announced she was applying for an annulment. The grounds for the annulment were non-consummation of the marriage. Ruskin, aware that it was Millais who had prompted this move, nevertheless continued stoically to pose for his portrait and Millais, equally stoically, continued painting it. John Ruskin at Glenfinlas was worth it – it is a masterpiece of portraiture and of Pre-Raphaelitism. It has become fêted as one of Millais’s finest portraits and is a sympathetic view of the man whose life he had helped to unravel. In the portrait, Ruskin looks downward, as if avoiding the viewer’s gaze. His is a humble visage and also a very sad one. It is easy to believe that any viewer, irrespective of whether they knew the details of its conception, could look at the painting and know that Ruskin was deeply troubled while it was being painted. It is also a great tribute to Millais’s professionalism that, despite his emotions towards the man he believed had made his beloved Effie so unhappy, he created a sympathetic and flattering portrait. Ruskin is painted standing beside a flowing Scottish burn, with one foot up on a rock. Millais had painted the background in situ, but needed to finish off the portrait after the ill-fated holiday had ended, so Ruskin spent several weeks posing at his London house after their return from Scotland. To achieve the desired position, he stood at the head of the stairs with one leg on the top step and the other on the stair below. He chose to stand at the very top to be as far away as possible from his usurper, whose easel was set up at the foot of the stairs. They did not speak once during the painful process. It was an excruciatingly uncomfortable time for both of them, far worse than Lizzie’s Ophelia ordeal.
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