Pre-Raphaelite supermodel Elizabeth Siddal is overshadowed by two enduring stories.
Catching cold while posing in the bath for Millais' painting of Ophelia, and her exhumation by husband Dante Gabriel Rosetti to retrieve his love poems.
'Lizzie' may have been mythologised as a tragic muse, but a Tate exhibition and new book are set to restore her as an inventive artist and idependent woman.
Crouch End author Jan Marsh's Elizabeth Siddal: Her Story coincides with major Tate exhibition The Rossettis. Both spotlight Siddal's artistic talent and tackle the mythoglogy surrounding her.
"For two generations now, the role of women in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood has been characterised as the lusty boys of the Brotherhood and their dolly birds who were passive models," says Marsh.
"But it was much more egalitarian and welcoming to women than anyone thought. Siddal is a figure who exemplifies this. She's portrayed as weak, passive and sickly but it's important to look at decisions you can assume she made about her life, and put together the known facts. What emerged was a completely different story of an aggressively independent woman in a proto-feminist age when the first challenges were being made to female disadvantage."
Born in 1829, Siddal grew up in Southwark the daughter of a cutler. She gained an introduction to the Brotherhood while working as a dressmaker to the family of Walter Deverell and showed him her drawings. Impressed by her figure, delicate features and dazzling copper hair, he painted her as Viola in Twelfth Night.
"She was more shopkeeper than working class and the fact that she had her own drawings indicates she had already been sketching," says Marsh.
"The whole movement was more collaborative and less male dominated than we have been led to believe. As soon as she was accepted into the circle and got together with Dante he encouraged and supported her ambitions."
Ruskin paid Siddal for her drawings and paintings, she produced sketches, watercolours, and exhibited a picture at the Pre-Raphaelites summer exhibition in 1857. Dante Gabriel painted her repeatedly, the pair fell passionately in love and married in Hastings in 1860 after a long engagement, settling in lodgings in Hampstead before moving to Blackfriars.
But before that was the famous painting of Shakespeare's doomed heroine which required some mettle from Siddal.
"Millais found this antique embroidered dress which she put on and lay in a tin bath filled with wather, he put little lights underneath to keep the water warm, but the story goes that he was so absorbed in painting Siddal's face that he didn't notice the temperature; she never said anything even though she was numb and caught a cold. But the curious thing is it didn't put her off modelling at all, she was obviously very keen to be in the studio."
Marsh, who curated the first solo exhibition of Siddal's work in 1991, reveals details of Siddal's travels, four months at art school in Sheffield, and brings fresh perspective to the post-natal trauma suffered after a stillbirth in 1861.
"She survived but didn't seemingly recover psychologically, there are tragic accounts of visitors seeing her sitting grieving by an empty cradle and saying 'shh'. She wanted to pass on the baby clothes to friends but they felt it was a bad omen. She was taking quantities of laudanum in liquid drops dissolved in water, which were the only pain killer available, and she took too much one night. The inquest into her untimely death suggests she was so distressed she didn't really care - the overdose was neither intentional nor unintentional."
Aged 32 she was buried in the Rossettis' plot in Highgate Cemetery alongside her father-in-law.
"As a dramatic, romantic gesture Dante Gabriel placed his fair copy notebook of his poems into the coffin, one of his friends tried to dissuade him, but seven years later he wanted to retrieve them and include them in a volume. It's very difficult to get permission to open a grave, you have to get approval from the Home Secretary. It's a curious mystery that there is no record of it in the archives, one can only guess that because Rossetti had dealings with the Home Secretary, he must have written directly and got permission."
Rossetti declined to be present but a lawyer, a medic and two friends attended the exhumation in 1869 and the retrieved verse burnished his repuation.
"He ordered nothing to be disturbed but the book, it had to be done at night because the cemetery was open to the public, it was all very gothic. When the story leaked out by word of mouth it added to the allure of the poems and became part of Siddal's posthumous reputation and myth that now seems unstoppable."
Far from being a passive victim Marsh says Siddal was "prickly, wilful, unafraid to speak her mind and often regarded as difficult or rude," including refusing to pay the customary calls on her in-law's Camden Town home after their wedding.
As a biographer and curator, Marsh has pioneered a feminist understanding of the hitherto neglected women in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood including curating PreRaphaelite Sisters at the NPG in 2019.
She says: "I am very pleased the Tate is going to foreground Siddal's artwork properly I just hope all the headlines aren't about being exhumed."
The Rossettis examines the romance, radicalism and myths of Dante Gabriel, Christina and Elizabeth showcasing their revolutionary progressive approach to life, love and art, and refusal to abide by the constraints of Victorian society.
Featuring 150 drawings, paintings, photography, design, illustrations and poetry it will also be the first full retrospective of Elizabeth Siddal for 30 years, featuring rare surviving watercolours and drawings.
Christina and Dante Gabriel’s poetry will be interwoven with the artworks alongside an immersive installation of Christina’s poetry, examples of Dante Gabriel’s teenage drawings, and portraits from his later career, such as Beata Beatrix which he painted as a memorial after Siddal's death.
The Rossettis runs at Tate Britain from April 6 to September 24. Elizabeth Siddal: Her Story is published by Pallas Athene on April 6.
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