Because of what the main muse of the Pre-Raphaelites, Lizzie Siddal, committed suicide

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In the winter of 1849-1850, artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt were writing together when their friend Walter Howell Deverell burst into the studio: "You guys have no idea what a stunningly beautiful creation I found!" the visitor exclaimed excitedly. From that very day, Elizabeth Siddal, bursting into the lives of artists, began to create history, leaving behind a sea of impressions seasoned with tragedy …

Today, few people remember the artist Deverell, who died of Bright's disease (kidney disease) at the age of twenty-seven, but he was an energetic member of a group of artists and writers that revolved around the newly formed Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This secret society of seven young people was founded in 1848 by Rossetti, Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, students of the Royal Academy of London. As highlighted in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, the Pre-Raphaelite movement also embraced women models, artists and writers. Lizzie Siddal started out as a model, then she learned to draw and also wrote poetry.

At the time Deverell visited his friends, Siddal worked in a milliner shop near Leicester Square in central London. The girl worked long hours in harsh conditions, and her family worried about her already fragile health. Perhaps this is why Siddal's mother made the unexpected decision to allow her daughter to work as a model for an artist, which was considered a shame and even synonymous with prostitution. Deverell himself dared not approach Lizzie's mother. Instead, he sent his own very venerable mother to Lizzie's mother to deal with the financial matter, and Mrs. Siddal was in awe as the carriage pulled up to her modest home on Old Kent Road.

Initially, Lizzie worked part-time as a model, and the rest of the time she worked part-time in a shop specializing in the sale of hats. After Deverell portrayed her as Viola in Twelfth Night, Holman Hunt portrayed her as Sylvia in Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus. She first posed for Rossetti in 1850, for one of his lesser-known paintings, Rossovestita.

According to his patron John Ruskin, Rossetti painted Lizzie hundreds of thousands of times over the course of their subsequent relationship.

Through her work as a model, charming Lizzie helped change public opinion about beauty.

While Lizzie's slender physique, skinny features and shiny copper-colored hair are considered signs of beauty in the 1850s, being very thin was not considered attractive (in terms of intimacy), and red hair was described by one journalist as "Social suicide". Through her work as a model and the success of the paintings in which she appeared, Lizzie helped change public opinion about beauty.

After a couple of years, she had saved enough money to leave the hat shop. As a model for the famous Ophelia Millet, her face has become a kind of calling card. Other artists demanded to paint her portrait, but Rossetti, who by this time was recognized as her lover, became jealous and asked her to pose only for him.

The love story between Lizzie and Rossetti is like a tortured teenage movie script: for ten years they were "engaged", but the artist refused to set a wedding date. All these years it was extremely difficult for them to live with each other: Siddal was addicted to opium, and Rossetti constantly cheated on her.

The artist visited her from time to time, but letters from friends in London revealed his connections with other women, and their relationship ended in mid-1858. Much of what happened in her life over the next two years remains a mystery. In the spring of 1860, she fell seriously ill. Her family contacted Raskin (Ruskin), and he told Rossetti about this, who hurried to her. Soon the artist arrived with permission to marry, and as soon as she recovered, they got married.

They spent a long honeymoon in Paris, from where they returned with a couple of former street dogs that they took as pets. Lizzie realized that she was pregnant, and Rossetti enjoyed painting her, including the brooding Regina Cordium (1860). She was delighted with the prospect of motherhood, but unfortunately became addicted to opium. Perhaps that is why on May 2, 1861, she gave birth to a dead daughter.

She never recovered from the depression that gripped her after the death of the child. Their marriage suffered, and she became convinced that Rossetti was unfaithful again, although his friends claimed that he was loyal to her during their marriage.

On the evening of February 10, 1862, Rossetti went to dinner with the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, and when he returned home, he went to teach an evening class at a workers' college. Before leaving, he saw that Lizzie had settled into bed and, as usual, took her dose of opium, and there was about half of the bottle left. When he returned from work, the bottle was empty. Lizzie slept so deeply that he could not wake her up, and she wrote him a note. Shouting to the hostess to call the doctor, Rossetti hid the incriminating letter.

Despite the efforts of four doctors, Lizzie Rossetti died in the early morning hours of February 11, 1862. On the advice of their friend Ford Madox Brown, Rossetti burned her suicide note. This was done so that she would not be declared a suicide and refused a Christian burial. By the time of her death, Lizzie was pregnant again. Perhaps she was afraid that her child would be born dead again and she would not be able to endure a second stillbirth.

Lizzie's story does not end with her death. Due to the eerie postscript to her life, she became a gothic cult figure. Rossetti put in his wife's coffin a single copy of the poems he had written. Seven years later, he decided he wanted them back.

Many people from all over the world in a strange way began to believe and consider Lizzie Siddal "undead".

On an autumn night in 1869 (in deepest secrecy), her coffin was exhumed from its resting place in London's Highgate Cemetery. Rossetti, whom some of his acquaintances already believed to be crazy, was not present. The entire operation was planned by his friend and self-styled agent Charles August Howell, a brilliant storyteller. There was no light in the cemetery, so a large fire was made.

Howell later told Rossetti that when the coffin was opened, his wife's body was perfectly preserved. She was not a skeleton, he falsely claimed, but she was as beautiful as she was in life, and her hair grew back, filling the coffin with a brilliant copper radiance that shone in the light of the flame. Thanks to Howell's superbly crafted fiction, there is a myth about the original supermodel's predominant beauty even in death - a myth that ensures that to this day many people around the world strangely believe that Lizzie remains undead.

Lizzie Siddal died at the age of thirty-two, but her extraordinary legacy continues. The restored poems of her husband were published, to great approval - although the history of the origin of his poems was kept in a closely guarded secret, and paintings with her image still captivate many men and connoisseurs of fine and sophisticated art …

Continuing the topic of art, read also about which women and men have inspired photographers, writers and artists.