Lizzie Siddal

by Lucinda Hawksley

  On September 22, 1855, Mrs Kincaid arrived in London, ready for her journey. Rossetti arranged a small family party at Chatham Place – with Rossetti family members only, not Siddalls – to wish them bon voyage. The next day, the travellers began their journey to France, taking the boat train from London, followed by the steamer to Le Havre, where they took another train to Paris.

  While in Paris, Lizzie intended to use her time, and money, to bring about an exciting change in her appearance. The floating gowns and flowing hair of the Pre-Raphaelites might be acceptable, and fashionable, in the artistic milieu of London, but in 1850s Paris, a woman needed to be chic – and most definitely corseted – in order to be acceptable. Lizzie and Mrs Kincaid managed to spend an unwisely large portion of her generous allowance in their first few weeks, and they were not yet any nearer to the South of France.

  In October, Rossetti received a furious letter from Ruskin, demanding to know why “Ida” had disobeyed him and was spending so much time in Paris. His one plan for her while in Paris – for what he had thought would be a duration of a couple of days while she recovered from the boat trip, before taking the train – was that she should meet the Brownings, who were living there for a while. She had not done so. Ruskin was also jealous of Rossetti’s intention to go out and meet Lizzie there and attempted to persuade him not to go. He wanted his remaining “genius” to stay in London and paint as much as possible while his distracting muse was out of the country for a few months. Blustering impotently, Ruskin ordered Rossetti to write and tell Lizzie to “go South directly”, insisting that “Paris will kill her, or ruin her”. As was his wont, when Ruskin said something Rossetti did not want to hear, Rossetti gently ignored him.

  Rossetti arrived in Paris on November 12 and stayed for ten days. He had travelled to France with the sculptor Alexander Munro and both artists were filled with excitement at the prospect of visiting the Paris Exhibition. Rossetti and the newly chic Lizzie visited the exhibition together – taking the opportunity to admire Lizzie in Millais’s Ophelia, which was one of the prime British exhibits. Munro was left to his own devices, causing him to write his letter to William Bell Scott (in which he commented that he had seen barely anything of Rossetti since they arrived, as he was always with Lizzie).

  By now, Rossetti had become socially acquainted with the Brownings and was keen to take Lizzie to meet them. In London, he had already shown Robert Browning one of Lizzie’s paintings, an illustration of Browning’s poem “Pippa Passes”, and hoped that if the great poet could meet and be taken with Lizzie, he might commission her to provide illustrations for his next volume. Pippa Passes is an interesting illustration for Lizzie to have chosen, having, as it does, parallels with her own life. In the poem, Pippa is a virtuous but poor girl who works in a silk factory. The episode Lizzie chose to illustrate is of Pippa taking a walk through the town and passing three prostitutes who are sitting on a cluster of steps and gossiping. The contrast between the demurely dressed Pippa and the more provocatively attired seated women is marked. Lizzie could well have silently subtitled the picture, “Lizzie and the loose models”. Pippa holds herself awkwardly, her spine and head held proudly erect with her right arm brought in close to her body as though protecting herself; the “loose women” are more fluid in their movements, at ease with their bodies and openly curious about her. They stare and seem to sneer at her, though there is also an obvious fascination on their faces, leading them to appraise the woman passing by. Lizzie’s Pippa glances sideways at them. On her face is a look of fear, but there is also a spark of interest. Pippa Passes is one of Lizzie’s most successful renderings of the human form, capturing a fluidity of movement and nuances of facial expressions.

  The portentous meeting Rossetti had hoped to effect between Browning and his adored dove was doomed to be of short duration. Disappointingly, Lizzie was so unwell on the appointed day that she was unable to stay for long and was not at her most impressive or beautiful. The longed-for commission did not emerge: Browning was accustomed to the signs of laudanum addiction, living with a wife who was reliant on the opiate, and he saw every day in his own marriage the obstacles ill health could cause for artistic creativity.

  Around the end of November, Lizzie finally forced herself to relinquish the pleasures of Parisian art and fashion and the travellers journeyed on to Nice. By the time they arrived, Lizzie had spent all her money and was prompted to write to Rossetti begging him to send her some more. Her letter put Rossetti into a fever of activity. With a speed that astonished Madox Brown, he began working day and night. Realizing that the paintings he was working on would require too long a period to complete, he started a new, less ambitious work, aimed at pleasing Ruskin, whom he hoped would buy it. It was a triptych of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, which he began and finished in just one week and for which Ruskin was justifiably happy to pay 35 guineas. The story of Paolo and Francesca comes from Dante’s Inferno and tells the tragic story of Francesca, a thirteenth-century noblewoman, who was unhappily married to Giovanni, Lord of Rimini. Giovanni’s younger brother, Paolo, was in love with Francesca and they became lovers. They were both executed for adultery in around 1289.

  The left panel of the triptych is a romantic image of Paolo and Francesca seated beside each other, holding hands and kissing. Before being tempted to kiss, they had been looking together at a large illustrated book, reading the story of those other doomed lovers, Lancelot and Guinevere. The book lies open, spanning both their laps and emphasizing their proximity to one another. Behind the lovers, framing the kiss, is an oval window. The figures resemble a young, romanticized Rossetti and Lizzie. Francesca’s long hair, highlighted by the light coming through the window, is a burnished red.

  The central panel of the triptych is a double portrait of an anxious Dante Alighieri and the ancient Roman poet Virgil. The two men are holding hands in a gesture of poetic solidarity and grief; Virgil has his left hand raised to his mouth in an expression of great sadness. Both men are wearing the laurel wreaths symbolic of poets, but which are also suggestive of victory and immortality. The painting includes a quotation from Canto V of Inferno, in which Dante himself speaks of the lovers’ plight. It is translated, “Alas, how many sweet thoughts, how great desire, brought them to the woeful pass!” It is a quotation that applied equally to Dante Rossetti and Lizzie, especially towards the end of Lizzie’s life.

  The right-hand panel is a poignant rendering of the lovers, bound together in death, being blown through the fires of hell. They hold on to one another tightly, locked in an eternal embrace, their eyes closed in death, just as they had been for the kiss. Both look sorrowing, but strangely peaceful. Even the flames of hell, stylized into droplets of Paisley-shaped fire, cannot force the lovers apart.

  This painting was not a new idea for Rossetti. He had been working on a design for the subject since 1849, but the speed with which he clarified his thoughts and executed this picture – still managing to produce a masterpiece despite his limited time scale – was the stuff of genius, romantically indicative of the artist’s overwhelming passion to see his own Francesca again. Missing Lizzie acutely, he determined to deliver the money in person and booked a passage on the first available steamer to France. He met up with the profligate travellers in Nice and stayed for a week, before coming back to work on the paintings he had laid aside before his frenzy.

  After several weeks dependent on one another’s company, wit and conversation, the travelling companions decided they had been spending rather too much time together and their affection for one another began to pall. By Christmas, Lizzie was using her poor health as an excuse to remain alone in her room – refusing even to come down for meals, requesting instead that they be sent up to her – to avoid spending time with Mrs Kincaid. The matronly Englishwoman had become all too aware that Lizzie’s ill health was partly imaginary and largely due to her consumption of laudanum. Not being in love with Lizzie, she was not prepared to make the allowances Rossetti always d
id. William Rossetti later recorded that up until the France excursion relations between the Rossettis and the Kincaids had been very friendly, but after the trip, Dante sided with Lizzie in opposition to his cousin. Mrs Kincaid took offence and the two families lost contact with each other. It was a rift that remained permanently unhealed.

  From all Lizzie’s months abroad, only one letter remains. It was written to Rossetti at the end of December, and displays her eloquence as well as her talent for the sarcasm which so discomfited William Rossetti. Rossetti had sent Lizzie money, which she had needed to fetch from the post office, an experience which she described wittily:

  On your leaving the boat, your passport is taken from you to the Police Station, and there taken charge of till you leave Nice. If a letter is sent to you containing money, the letter is detained at the Post-Office, and another written to you by the postmaster ordering you to present yourself and passport for his inspection. You have then to go to the Police Station and beg the loan of your passport for half-an-hour, and are again looked upon as a felon of the first order before [the] passport is returned to you. Looking very much like a transport, you make your way to the Post Office, and there present yourself before a grating, which makes the man behind it look like an overdone mutton-chop sticking to a gridiron. On asking for a letter containing money, Mutton-chop sees at once that you are a murderer, and makes up its mind not to let you off alive; and, treating you as Cain and Alice Gray61 in one, demands your passport. After glaring at this and your face (which has by this time become scarlet, and is taken at once as a token of guilt), a book is pushed through the bars of gridiron, and you are expected to sign your death-warrant by writing something which does not answer to the writing on the passport. Meanwhile Mutton-chop has been looking as much like doom as overdone mutton can look, and fizzing in French, not one word of which is understood by Alice Gray. But now comes the reward of merit. Mutton sees at once that no two people living and at large could write so badly as the writing on the passport and that in the book; so takes me for Alice, but gives me the money, and wonders whether I shall be let off from hard labour the next time I am taken, on account of my thinness. When you enter Police Station to return the passport, you are glared at through wooden bars with marked surprise at not returning in company of two cocked-hats, and your fainting look is put down to your having been found out in something. They are forced, however, to content themselves by expecting to have a job in a day or so. This is really what one has to put up with, and it is not at all comic when one is ill. I will write again when [my] boil is better, or tell you about any lodgings if we are able to get any.

  There was an English dinner here on Christmas Day, ending with plum-pudding, which was really very good indeed, and an honour to the country. I dined in my room, where I have dined for the last three weeks on account of bores. First class, one can get to the end of the world; but one can never be left alone or left at rest.

  Lonely without Lizzie, Rossetti spent New Year’s Eve 1855 with the Madox Browns; contrarily, his animosity for Emma had dissipated now that she was no longer able to spend time with Lizzie. Instead of resenting her, he was happy to see her as being a remembrance of Guggum. Ford noted in his diary that Rossetti had by now sent Lizzie £55 in the three months since her departure. He had also bought himself a fantastic set of new clothes – “he looked handsome and a gentleman” – and was talking of buying himself a watch, but was careful not to mention paying back the £15 he owed to Ford. That New Year’s Eve was not without its excitement, as Ford also recorded in his diary. Halfway through the evening, Emma realized that the roaring fire in the grate had sparked off a chimney fire. While her husband rushed outside and up a ladder to extinguish the flames, Rossetti decided he could best help by raking all the coals out of the grate to cool off and stop any more sparks going up the chimney. Unfortunately he did so without putting down any protective covering, spilling them out on to the Madox Browns’ new Kidderminster carpet and ruining it in the process. As usual, Ford was indulgent in his diary entry, despite his obvious annoyance.

  Although he spent his New Year’s Eve quietly at home with a married couple, Rossetti did not spend all his time mourning his lover’s absence. He had met two new friends, intriguing young men who were interested in the Pre-Raphaelites and in flattering awe of Rossetti. Their names were William Morris (1834–96), known as “Topsy”, and Edward Burne-Jones (1833–98), known as “Ned”. Morris came from a privileged background. He was financially secure but still threw himself passionately into his work, bursting with creative energy that desired an outlet and with a political soul that led him to become a confirmed and active Socialist.62 In the mid-1850s, Morris’s chief desire was to be a designer – he began his career working with an architect – and a poet, but Rossetti convinced him that any man who had poetry in his soul should also be a painter. In awe of Rossetti, Morris followed his advice and struggled valiantly to paint to his own satisfaction – though his self-judgement was harsh. Like Rossetti, Burne-Jones was a born painter. A motherless child growing up in an impoverished home in Birmingham, he had known from the start that he was destined to be an artist. He and Morris had met in Oxford, realized they shared an ideology and decided to rent a studio together. In London, they rented rooms in Red Lion Square, where Rossetti and Deverell had shared a studio several years earlier.

  It was not only Topsy and Ned with whom Rossetti spent his bachelor months. With Lizzie in France and Holman Hunt still safely in the Middle East, Rossetti and Annie Miller found they had ample opportunity to console one another – but a shock was in store. Holman Hunt appeared back in England unexpectedly at the end of January 1856, confident of finding Annie waiting eagerly for him, her manners and morals improved drastically by the education programme he had set in motion for her and her personal habits now suitable for a woman who was to become his wife. One of the first things Holman Hunt was told by Madox Brown after his return was that Lizzie was no longer a model – she was now a serious artist. Strangely, Madox Brown also told him that Lizzie was not Rossetti’s fiancée, just his pupil. It is uncertain why he made such a comment, only months after wondering in his diary why Rossetti did not marry her. One must assume that he knew the wandering artist was going to find out about Rossetti’s affair with Annie and that he hoped Holman Hunt would be able to forgive Rossetti more readily if he believed he was a single man than if he thought he had been cheating on Lizzie to be with Annie.

  With Holman Hunt back and Annie no longer available, Rossetti was once more on his own and missing Lizzie. On February 15, 1856, he wrote a belated Valentine’s poem which he posted to Nice. In it he bemoaned his solitary painting labours and described his lonely days spent looking at the clock on St Paul’s Cathedral – the hands of which were moving far too slowly for the lovesick artist wishing away the days until Lizzie could come home.

  A Valentine

  Yesterday was St Valentine.

  Thought you at all, dear dove divine,

  Upon the beard in sorry trim

  And rueful countenance of him,

  That Orson who’s your Valentine?

  He daubed, you know, as usual.

  The stick would slip, the brush would fall:

  Yet daubed he till the lamplighter

  Set those two seedy flames astir;

  But growled all day at slow St Paul.

  The bore was heard ere noon; the dun

  Was at the door by half-past one:

  At least ’tis thought so, but the clock –

  No Lizzy there to help its stroke –

  Struck work before the day begun.

  At length he saw St Paul’s bright orb

  Flash back – the serried tide absorb

  That burning West which sucked it up

  Like wine poured in a water-cup;

  And one more twilight toned his daub.

  Some time over the fire he sat,

  So lonely that he missed his cat;

  Then wildly ru
shed to dine on tick –

  Nine minutes swearing for his stick,

  And thirteen minutes for his hat.

  And now another day is gone:

  Once more that intellectual one

  Desists from high-minded pursuits,

  And hungry, staring at his boots,

  Has not the strength to pull them on.

  Come back, dear Liz, and looking wise

  In that armchair which suits your size,

  Through some fresh drawing scrape a hole.

  Your Valentine and Orson’s soul

  Is sad for those two friendly eyes.

  During that spring, in her absence, Rossetti and Ruskin were busy promoting Lizzie as an artist and some of her paintings were displayed in an exhibition in Charlotte Street, London. This was a major achievement in an age when female artists were seldom taken seriously – even though two of the founders of the Royal Academy had been female, in the 1850s women were still not allowed to be members of the Academy and women’s art seldom made it into the public arena.

  Holman Hunt and Rossetti were both invited to the private view of the exhibition and the former unwittingly offended Rossetti with his attempt to be complimentary about Lizzie’s works. He told him that, had he not known they were Lizzie’s, he would have mistaken them for Walter Deverell’s pictures, because the style and colours were so similar. Although he had intended them as a compliment, his words provoked in Rossetti an irrational fury. The fiery Italian turned on his fellow artist in a passion, telling him Lizzie’s pictures were better than anything Deverell had ever done. Holman Hunt was understandably taken aback, recording later in his memoirs, “I had thought that to compare the attempts of Miss Siddal, who had only exercised herself in design for two years, and had had no fundamental training, to those of Gabriel’s dear, deceased friend, who had satisfactorily gone through the drilling of the Academy school, would be taken as a compliment, but Rossetti received it as an affront.” It must be presumed that Rossetti’s unpredictable behaviour had more to do with Holman Hunt’s untimely return and its interference in his affair with Annie than with his comments about Lizzie’s pictures. The incident does, however, demonstrate to what extent Rossetti’s obsession with Lizzie was able to affect his judgement.