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Women’s Studies, 38:611–646, 2009

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC


ISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 online
DOI: 10.1080/00497870903021505

“THAT I MAY NOT FAINT, OR DIE, OR SWOON”:


1547-7045Studies,
0049-7878
GWST
Women’s Studies Vol. 38, No. 6, June 2009: pp. 1–41

REVIVING PRE-RAPHAELITE WOMEN

EMILY J. ORLANDO
Reviving
Emily J. Orlando
Pre-Raphaelite Women

Fairfield University

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 or 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.
—Christina Rossetti, “In an Artist’s Studio”

Fox News’s recent decision to broadcast live footage of the dead body
of twenty-year-old supermodel Ruslana Korshunova confirms that the
death of a beautiful woman, famously lauded by Poe as the most poet-
ical topic, retains its appeal in twenty-first-century visual culture.1

1
Shortly after making the video available on 30 June 2008, Fox News issued a
lukewarm apology, citing a “producer error.” The passage from Poe’s “Philosophy of
Composition” (1846) is as follows: “the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably,
the most poetical topic in the world—and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best
suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”
I would like to thank Jaime Osterman Alves, Sharon Becker, Johanna X. K. Garvey, Jill
K. Karn, and Nels C. Pearson for their invaluable encouragement and support of this
essay. For generous assistance with permissions, grateful acknowledgment is made to:
Margaretta Frederick (Delaware Art Museum), Thomas Haggerty (Bridgeman Art Li-
brary), Tom Heaven (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery), Jennifer M. Holl (Delaware
Art Museum), Laura McLardy (Tate), Duncan Walker (Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and
Museum), and Robert Upstone (Tate).
Address correspondence to Dr. Emily J. Orlando, English Department, Fairfield
University, DMH 130, 1073 North Benson Road, Fairfield, CT 06824. E-mail: eorlando@
fairfield.edu

611
612 Emily J. Orlando

The video, with Geraldo Rivera’s claim that the sight of the model’s
corpse “stands in stark contrast to the fairy-tale images of the
famous face and chestnut hair that made her modeling’s next big
thing,” was quickly made available across the Internet. One blog-
ger troublingly confessed that the model, discovered on a New
York sidewalk after apparently leaping nine stories to her death,
“still looks beautiful even with the blood on her mouth.”2
Korshunova, dubbed a “face to be excited about” by British Vogue
and promptly labeled “the Russian Rapunzel,” had been cele-
brated for resembling “something out of a fairy tale.” Contrary to
Rivera’s suggestion, Fox News’s “exclusive” image of the broken
female body is not far removed from the fairy-tale picture he
cites: the long shot of the model’s loosely shrouded, remarkably
intact corpse, lying with back to the ground, the pale face and
upper body made visible by a gentle breeze, was presented as a
motionless heroine reminiscent of Sleeping Beauty or Snow
White.3 Indeed, our collective response to Korshunova’s tragedy
mirrors the nineteenth century’s fascination with the pale, passive
female bodies recorded in visual art as beautiful corpses, and
also, more importantly, the disturbing extent to which this aes-
thetic remains impervious to change.
Elizabeth (“Lizzie”) Siddall (1829–1862), the nineteenth-
century version of the supermodel, was, like Korshunova, better
known for her face than her voice and seems to have died by her
own hand.4 Although this essay will position Siddall and her

2
www.celebitchy.com, 30 June 2008, 4:10 pm.
3
While the spectacle might sensibly recall the similarly untimely death in the same
city, months before, of the promising young actor Heath Ledger, and the media frenzy
that ensued, no such footage of the male actor’s undraped corpse—nor, for that mat-
ter, of the bodies of fallen Iraq War soldiers—was made available by the press. Indeed,
more attention was rightly paid to Ledger’s impressive body of work than to his tragic
death.
4
I refer to my subject by the original spelling of her last name rather than Dante
Gabriel Rossetti’s (Siddal). Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock, who also prefer
“Siddall,” make a strong case for acknowledging the difference: “Implementing a distinction
between Siddall and ‘Siddal’ a theoretical wedge has been driven between the still
problematic historical individual E. E. Siddall and ‘Siddal,’ the product of and for art
historical texts. Traversing the textual territory in which ‘Siddal’ was produced it has been
indicated how through both the narrative of the artist’s life-story and love-story and the
imbrication of these texts with the drawings and paintings of female figures Pre-Raphaelite
literature has constituted an active masculine subject inspired (or aroused) by a passive
feminine object” (224).
Reviving Pre-Raphaelite Women 613

female peers as artists who labored to revise culturally


entrenched images of themselves as doomed, desperate, or
otherwise disempowered, this pervasive set of disabling tropes is
well worth revisiting at the outset. In the paintings that made
the Pre-Raphaelites famous, Lizzie Siddall and her fellow
models were regularly depicted as sleeping, sickly, or sentenced
to silence. Literary artists also have imagined the ideal woman
according to these terms. William Butler Yeats’s poem “He
Wishes His Beloved Were Dead” (1899) is a case in point: “O
would, beloved, that you lay/Under the dock-leaves in the
ground,/While lights were paling one by one.” In the speaker’s
perfect world, the “she” of the poem, whose strong will is
compared to “wild birds,” would die, the suggestion being that
“he” likes her better thus immobilized. Across the Atlantic,
Louisa May Alcott’s rambunctious Jo March would similarly be
rewarded for growing thinner, paler, and less restless, qualities
which men find pleasing. Happy to see a change in his daughter,
Mr. March observes,

Her face is rather thin and pale, just now, with watching and anxiety; but
I like to look at it, for it has grown gentler, and her voice is lower; she
doesn’t bounce, but moves quietly, . . . which delights me. (Alcott 223)

Lizzie Siddall also was admired for looking “thinner and more
deathlike and more beautiful and more ragged than ever.”5
For generations, she was thought to have suffered from
pulmonary consumption, though modern-day scholars suggest
anorexia nervosa (Pollock 103). Equating “deathlike” with
“beautiful” anticipates our own culture’s preference for unnat-
ural thin-ness in our models and celebrities and perhaps
explains why the Pre-Raphaelites have enjoyed an extraordinary

5
The remark was made in 1854 by the painter Ford Madox Brown. Jan Marsh
notes that “there is no evidence that Elizabeth Siddal suffered from any specific
physical complaint. Commonly described as tall and elegant, she never exhibited . . .
any of the well-defined and recognizable symptoms of tuberculosis. Neuralgia—a
term coined in the nineteenth century to describe intense intermittent headaches
such as migraine—is a rather vague condition, not a disease” (Marsh, Legend 63).
For discussion of the trope of the female invalid, see Diane Price Herndl’s Invalid
Women.
614 Emily J. Orlando

revival of interest in popular and academic culture since the


1990s.6
Christina Rossetti, the distinguished Victorian poet, recog-
nized something fundamentally wrong-headed in wishing our
beloveds to look (or to be) dead. Her sonnet titled “In an Artist’s
Studio,” which concerns her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s
relationship with Elizabeth Siddall, critiques a paradigm in which
the male artist paints his model, muse, and eventual wife “[n]ot
as she is but as she fills his dream.”7 The poem also compels us to
consider the real woman who “looks out from all his canvases,”
whose face the painter “feeds upon . . . by day and night.”8
Christina evidently appreciated the predicament of models like
Lizzie Siddall, who is best known as the Pre-Raphaelite “stunner”9
immortalized as John Everett Millais’s drowning Ophelia (1852)
and other masterworks of Victorian art (Figure 1). Christina her-
self posed for the Pre-Raphaelites in their early, religious phase,
modeling as the Virgin Mary in Dante Rossetti’s The Girlhood of

6
While the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood cannot be said to privilege the
sort of thinness idealized (and criticized) in supermarket tabloids (e.g., Lindsay Lohan,
Keira Knightley, Nicole Richie), its replication of pictures of fainting, beautiful dream-
ers often courting death may explain its current appeal. The 1990s and the first decade
of the new century witnessed a remarkable resurgence of interest in the Pre-Raphaelites,
with major exhibitions at such venues as the Delaware Art Museum, Washington’s
National Gallery of Art, Nashville’s Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Moscow’s Tretyakov
State Gallery, London’s National Gallery, National Museums Liverpool, and Tate
Britain. Calendars, greeting cards, websites (e.g., LizzieSiddal.com), and scholarly
monographs engaging the Pre-Raphaelites all attest to their relevance to turn-of-the-
century culture.
7
Though dated 1856, Christina Rossetti’s sonnet was first published 1896 (Marsh,
Legend 56). While “In an Artist’s Studio” criticizes a specific misrepresentation—Dante
Rossetti’s canvases depict Siddall as “fair,” “joyful,” and not (as the poem suggests Lizzie in
fact was) “dim” with “sorrow” and “wan with waiting” for his deferred promise of
marriage–the poem more broadly indicts the ways in which the Pre-Raphaelites represent
women as fantasies rather than realities.
8
Christina Rossetti’s suggestion that the male artist (cannibalistically) “feeds upon”
the model’s beauty is all the more problematic when we consider that Lizzie Siddall was
physically wasting away and, as we have seen, thought lovelier for it.
9
Dante Gabriel Rossetti used the term “stunner” to describe a woman so beautiful
she ought to be painted. The phrase was adopted by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Christina and Elizabeth met in person for the first time in 1854 (Hawksley 30). While
Jan Marsh notes that Christina and Elizabeth were not confidantes, the former was sup-
portive of the plan to feature Siddall’s work in a posthumous exhibition: “I shall be real-
ly pleased if our poor Lizzie’s name and fame can be brought forward,” she wrote to her
brother William (Marsh, Legend 46–47).
Reviving Pre-Raphaelite Women 615

FIGURE 1 Sir John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851–2 © Tate, London 2009.

FIGURE 2 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation),


1849–50 © Tate, London 2009.

Mary Virgin (1848–49) and The Annunciation (1850) (Figure 2).


These paintings exemplify the Pre-Raphaelite tendency to represent
women as pale, passive, sickly, sexually objectified, broken, bereft,
dying, dead—or a combination thereof. Elizabeth Siddall also cri-
tiques these representations in the poem from which this essay
takes its title. The female speaker of Siddall’s “A Silent Wood,”
feeling “frozen like a thing of stone,” longs for a space where she
“may not faint, or die, or swoon.”
What makes these representations of women as fainting,
dying, swooning objets d’art all the more troubling is that history
often forgets that the majority of these Pre-Raphaelite models
were themselves artists. Christina Rossetti was a candidate for
the Poet Laureate after Tennyson–better known as a poet, in
616 Emily J. Orlando

her own day, than her brother. Elizabeth Siddall was a painter
and poet of great promise. Jane Morris was a skilled embroi-
derer and contributor to the Arts and Crafts Movement. Maria
Zambaco was a gifted sculptor. Marie Spartali (later Stillman)
was a prolific and accomplished painter. These women of the
Pre-Raphaelite circle, some of whom are discussed in detail
below, were makers of art, even though posterity has remem-
bered them primarily as the pale, wan (and, in Siddall’s case,
tragic) embodiments of the fin-de-siècle ideal of beauty. The
following pages will consider the heretofore unacknowledged
extent to which Siddall and her Pre-Raphaelite sisters engaged,
wrestled with, and revised the way they were represented in
Victorian visual art. Siddall in fact laid the groundwork for a
younger generation of artists who similarly took possession of
their own images in acts of visual and verbal self-portraiture.
Rather than leaving behind pictures of themselves as dead or
dying bodies, they moved beyond the likes of Ruslana
Korshunova insofar as they bequeathed to us, some one hundred
and fifty years ago, an oeuvre that includes self-portraits of live,
politically, and ideologically conscious, creative beings.
After a brief history of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
(PRB) illuminating its problematic mode of representing
women as languid queens, beatified beauties, and nameless
girls–vividly illustrated in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix
and A Parable of Love—I will show the women of the Pre-Raphaelite
circle re-working the postures and predicaments in which their
faces and bodies had been placed. As I hope to demonstrate,
what has been recently said of American women sculptors is
equally true of the women orbiting the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood:

Women . . . often creat[ed] images of themselves that contradicted


the stereotypical male image of women as an erotic nude, tired
housewife, passive mistress, rescue victim, or evil witch. Instead, they
began to portray themselves as competent, strong, and courageous.
(Anderson 17)

In the case of Pre-Raphaelite women, the recuperative act of self-


portraiture is as much about reclaiming their own representation
as it is about exposing and dismantling the ideology of the
Reviving Pre-Raphaelite Women 617

aesthetic for which they have served as symbols.10 The woman-


authored images discussed below are metaphorically and in some
cases literally self-portraits, each one a feminist re-working of a
disempowering female trope. As Whitney Chadwick has observed:

Every woman who paints a self-portrait, or sculpts a likeness, or places her-


self in front of the lens of a camera whose shutter she controls, challenges
in some way the complex relationship that exists between masculine
agency and feminine passivity in Western art history. . . . [I]n taking up
brush or pen, chisel or camera, women assert a claim to the representa-
tion of women (as opposed to Woman) that Western culture long ago
ceded to male genius and patriarchal perspectives, and . . . in turning to
the image in the mirror they take another step towards the elaboration of
a sexualized subjective female identity. (Rideal 9)

As we shall see, the Pre-Raphaelite women once sentenced to


silence as expiring Beatrices took up brush and pen, turned to
the mirror, and re-imagined themselves as thriving Beatrices.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of seven bright,
young British artists and poets, set out in 1848 to create a new
style of painting inspired by Gothic and late-medieval art. The
original members were as follows: the Rossetti brothers (painter-
poet Dante Gabriel and critic-historian William Michael); paint-
ers James Collinson, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais,
and Frederic George Stephens; and sculptor Thomas Woolner.
Pre-Raphaelitism, considered the first avant-garde movement in
British painting, influenced the painters of the Symbolist and
Aesthetic movements in England and France (Bullen 1, Barnes 113).
The movement was spear-headed in its first generation by the Anglo-
Italian Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Millais, and Ford Madox Brown (not
a founding member, but an honorary Pre-Raphaelite11). From the

10
I locate a similar revision of passive female stereotypes in the literary and visual art
of the women of the Harlem Renaissance. My essay “‘Feminine Calibans’ and ‘Dark
Madonnas of the Grave’: The Imaging of Black Women in the New Negro Renaissance”
(2006) shows women artists of the Harlem Renaissance engaging and revising a decidedly
anti-feminist aesthetic.
11
Brown, born in 1821, was older than the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, and quickly became an important associate and mentor. The PRB had
officially disbanded by 1853 but the majority of the members remained active. The second
generation of Pre-Raphaelites included Sir Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris,
artists who applied the tenets of the movement not only to painting and poetry but also to
illustrated books and interior design (des Cars).
618 Emily J. Orlando

beginning, the Pre-Raphaelites were rebelling against the values


of the Royal Academy (RA), which advocated an imitation of the
Old Masters. They were particularly critical of the neoclassical
painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (“Sir Sloshua,” they called him), first
President of the RA and a symbol of the establishment. Singling
out the art of Raphael as the site where things went astray in
visual art, they wanted to retreat to the style of painting produced
before him (or “pre-Raphael”). They privileged, for instance, the
work of such earlier Italian Renaissance artists as Fra Angelico,
Mantegna, and Botticelli. The Brotherhood was especially critical
of Raphael’s Transfiguration (1518) as “a painting which should
be condemned,” according to Holman Hunt, “for its grandiose
disregard of the simplicity of truth” (des Cars 16). Raphael’s
highly dramatic depiction of the ascension of Christ was deni-
grated for its violation of what the PRB considered to be honest
and true.
Although “truth to nature” was supposed to be a guiding
principle for the young artists who called themselves the Pre-
Raphaelites, fidelity to nature was eventually abandoned in favor of
a pursuit of a highly unnatural ideal. For all the Pre-Raphaelites’s
talk of breaking free of convention, the movement proved, in
many ways, to be backward-looking rather than forward-thinking
(Bullen 217). It is pointedly ironic that, while the PRB set out to
right the wrongs of those they considered to be the stilted
academic painters–and particularly their ways of representing
women–they ultimately committed the very sins they so
vehemently protested. In the end, those elements of academic art
that made the Pre-Raphaelites cringe paradoxically reared their
unwelcome heads in their own work: “repetitive formulas,
frivolous representations of women, reductive attitudes and a
certain overall slickness” (Casteras 145). Although John Ruskin, the
formidable art critic and influential friend to the Pre-Raphaelites,
had discouraged artists from trying to improve upon nature, the
images of women presented on PRB canvases, and especially
Rossetti’s later works, were waxen, over-the-top, and far from
realistic.
Rossetti’s provocative nude Venus Verticordia (1863–68), in
English “Venus, Turner of Hearts,” serves as a pointed exam-
ple (Figure 3). In this sumptuous painting, the Roman
goddess of love recognized for turning men’s hearts toward
Reviving Pre-Raphaelite Women 619

FIGURE 3 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Venus Verticordia, 1864-8 © Russell-Cotes Art


Gallery & Museum/Bournemouth, UK. Photograph reproduced with the kind
permission of the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum.

infidelity is presented as a golden-haloed, bare-breasted tempt-


ress bearing in her left hand the forbidden fruit. Though her
powers of seduction would seem to grant her agency, the
woman’s mobility is compromised by the bed of overripe roses
and honeysuckles within which she has been planted. The
arrow she holds neither subtly nor gently directs our gaze
toward her exposed left breast. These details demote the god-
dess to a sort of pin-up girl, effectively situating her such that
she is rather “all sexed up” with nowhere to go. Venus and the
other female figures depicted in Rossetti’s pictures are not
“portraits” but rather anonymous types. Rossetti’s remarks
suggest he liked it that way: he was discouraged to learn that
his Bocca Baciata (The Kissed Mouth), inspired by a Boccaccio
sonnet, was identified by critics as a portrait of his mistress and
model Fanny Cornforth (Wilton 97). In anticipation of the
fin-de-siècle predilection for “art for art’s sake,” Rossetti would
have preferred that the image be divorced from any specific
associations. Christina Rossetti’s sonnet is especially apt here,
for so many of these canvases project the image of the “name-
less girl” resounding with “[t]hat same one meaning, neither
620 Emily J. Orlando

more nor less.” As her speaker suggests, aesthetic anonymity is


an important component of the male painter’s erotic
“dreams,” and her poem elucidates the way in which the
artistic process was theorized as a kind of sexual conquest.
Indeed, for the Pre-Raphaelites, the slippage between
painting a woman and having sexual relations with her was as
literal as it was metaphorical (Smith 87).12 In addition to
Rossetti, other members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle who
became involved with, and eventually married, their models are
Ford Madox Brown and Frederic Shields (Marsh, The Pre-Raphaelite
Sisterhood 38). Alexa Wilding, who posed for Venus Verticordia
and other of Rossetti’s best-known works, seems to have been
one of the only Rossetti models with whom the painter was not
sexually involved.13 (He described her as “not gifted or
amusing” [Jiminez 568].) Edward Burne-Jones engaged in an
extramarital romance with his model, the sculptor Maria
Zambaco. While these liaisons–most of them temporarily or
entirely extramarital–would have been condoned in Bohemian
circles, artists tended to preserve an appearance of respectability,
often admitting their model-lovers to their studios through a
separate, private entrance (Smith 87).
The women of the Pre-Raphaelite circle were compelled to
make compromises in the name of art, and these compromises
conflicted with the strides that were concurrently being made in
the name of women’s rights. Susan P. Casteras has noted that in
Pre-Raphaelite paintings,

women were generally distorted as passive visual objects, dominated by


the gaze of the men who made and stared at them in real life and on
canvas. Such . . . biases are particularly problematic when placed in a
social context, for just as English women were striving to gain new

12
Alison Smith notes that for the PRB, the artist—model relationship “had long been
the focus of gossip and sexual innuendo—and artists’ relationships with their models had
not always been conducted on a purely professional basis. Rossetti was far from conventional
as was apparent from his relationship with [his model and mistress] Fanny Cornforth
[and, it seems, Annie Miller]. . . . [Frederick] Sandys’s private life was even more erratic;
in 1867 he eloped with the model and actress Mary Jones, having earlier (or concurrently)
had a relationship with a gipsy woman called Keomi” (87).
13
While Lizzie Siddall’s presence dominated Rossetti’s art for over a decade, his other
models include Alexa Wilding, Jane Morris, Fanny Cornforth, Annie Miller, and Marie
Spartali (later Stillman, herself an aspiring painter).
Reviving Pre-Raphaelite Women 621

rights, more just treatment, and liberalized divorce laws, they were the
targets of protracted artistic voyeurism by the Pre-Raphaelites and
other artists, who frequently cast them into rigid if beautiful stereo-
types. (146)

So in spite–or let us say because–of advancements in the social


standing of nineteenth-century British women, and escalating
debates encircling the “Woman Question,” these images served to
reinforce women’s status as objects of a gaze that would control,
sexually objectify, and commodify.
An illustrative example of the kind of Pre-Raphaelite art
that enshrines women and eroticizes their deaths is found in
Dante Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix (Blessed Beatrice), a painting that
became a kind of memorial to the artist’s late wife, Elizabeth
Siddall (Figure 4). One scholar, in fact, eerily called it a
“tombstone” (Hilton 179). The story of Dante Alighieri and his
unrequited love for Beatrice Portinari was extremely important

FIGURE 4 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, circa 1864–70 © Tate, London
2009.
622 Emily J. Orlando

to Rossetti. The painter’s father Gabriele, a Dante scholar,


named his son for the Italian poet. In fact, though Rossetti was
christened “Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti” and answered to
the name “Gabriel,” he signed his work Dante Gabriel Rossetti to
emphasize his identification with Alighieri, whose verse he began
translating as a teenager. His muses, Lizzie Siddall and later Jane
Morris, were cast as Beatrice dead or dying. Rossetti claimed he
based Beata Beatrix on a “life-sized head of my wife, begun many
years ago,” completing it after Siddall’s 1862 death, between 1864
and 1870 (Marsh, Legend 12). Notwithstanding his narrative of
the picture’s conception, an unfortunate rumor had it that
Rossetti propped up Lizzie’s corpse on her deathbed while he
painted Beata Beatrix. Urban legends of this sort–coupled with
the uncomfortable fact of Rossetti’s exhumation of Siddall’s
body—cement her status as a woman whose beauty was exploited,
in death as in life, in the name of art.14 Rossetti, presumably
wracked by guilt over his infidelities, buried a draft of his poems
with Siddall but exhumed her coffin in 1869 to retrieve the manu-
script and publish it. As Jan Marsh aptly notes,

Rossetti’s own ambiguous justification is worth noting. Shortly after the


event, he wrote to Swinburne [who admired Lizzie, explaining,] . . . “The
truth is, no one so much as herself would have approved of my doing
this.” (Marsh, Legend 21)

Even after her death, Rossetti reinscribes Siddall’s role as an


unswerving supporter of his art. Beata Beatrix, which was so
central to Rossetti that he produced six copies, was exhibited to
the general public for the first time in 1883, a year after he died
(Marsh, Legend 25). The exhibition’s timing helped promote
Lizzie’s status as a kind of idol for the decadents.
In Rossetti’s visual narrative, Beatrice, her eyes closed and
hands rested on her lap in a prayerful pose, transitions from earth
to heaven: put simply, she dies. Rossetti explained the image thus:

14
One legend, apparently circulated by Charles Augustus Howell, who oversaw the
disinterment, holds that Lizzie’s coppery-red hair had grown to fill her coffin, and that her
body was as beautiful in death as in life (Hawksley 211). The corpse’s alleged perfection
aligns her with a Catholic saint (e.g., Bernadette of Lourdes, Catherine of Bologna) and
anticipates the twenty-first century blogger who insists the Kazakh supermodel “still looks
beautiful” in death.
Reviving Pre-Raphaelite Women 623

“It is not at all intended to represent Death . . . but to render it


under the resemblance of a trance, in which Beatrice seated at the
balcony overlooking the City is suddenly rapt from Earth to
Heaven” (Daly 94). Rossetti’s choice of words (suddenly rapt) is tell-
ing, for when we position Beata Beatrix alongside Bernini’s famous
sculpture The Ecstasy of St Teresa (1652), a work to which Rossetti
seems to pay homage and which similarly conflates a woman’s
spiritual ecstasy with sexual surrender, the erotic overtones ring
loudly. By association, Beatrice’s death is imagined as a sexually
charged rapture. Rossetti’s picture makes use of several symbols,
each of which serves to sedate the image of Beatrice: a dove (recall-
ing the “meek unconscious dove” to which Rossetti affectionately
compared Siddall); a sundial (implying Beatrice’s hours are
numbered); a white poppy (suggestive of laudanum, the opiate on
which Siddall overdosed).15 In the background, the figure of Love
appears on the left, dressed in red, while Dante, the would-be lover
of Beatrice, is present to the right, casting a rather ominous
shadow; also visible is a bridge, reflective of Beatrice’s (and
Siddall’s) passage from life to death. The cultural inclination to use
art to dream the deaths of beautiful women has been documented
by Elisabeth Bronfen, who notes that “death turns the woman into
an object of sight–the dead feminine body comparable to an exhib-
ited art object” (Bronfen xiii).16 Perhaps nowhere is this tendency

15
Dante Rossetti refers to Siddall as “meek, unconscious dove” in his letter to
Christina Rossetti dated 4 August 1852, in Doughty and Wahl, 109. Rossetti often sketched
doves in his letters when referring to Siddall.
16
Bronfen argues that these artworks emerge at the expense of the death of a beauti-
ful woman and the works themselves are treated like female corpses (73). The trope of the
beautiful female corpse prevails in the art and literature of the period that produced the
Pre-Raphaelites. The narrator of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, speaking of the
grave of a feminist who bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Margaret Fuller, claims
“the grass grew all the better . . . for the decay of the beautiful woman who slept beneath.”
Beautiful, dead, marriageable women–once fired with “the will of wild birds” as Yeats
would put it–are replicated across the pages and canvases of nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century culture. A cursory glance would yield the following: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary;
Henry James’s Daisy Miller; Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles; Stephen Crane’s Mag-
gie: A Girl of the Streets; Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and the stories of such doomed
damsels as The Lady of Shalott and Ophelia, brought to us by Tennyson and Shakespeare,
and translated by such painters as Millais, Rossetti, and Waterhouse. The Pre-Raphaelite
appeal trickled into the twentieth century, which finds Ezra Pound engaging Rossetti,
Siddall, and their peers in “Yeux Glauques” (section V of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”).
Reflecting on war-torn Europe, Pound seems to locate an aesthetic more pure and
innocent in the Pre-Raphaelites.
624 Emily J. Orlando

toward necrophilia more egregious than in Lord Henry’s reflec-


tion on the suicide of Sibyl Vane in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1891): “There is something to me quite beautiful
about her death,” he tells Dorian, adding, “I am glad I am living in
a century when such wonders happen” (Wilde 99). The perfect
Sibyl or Beatrice, it would seem, is a dead one.
Examining Rossetti’s early drawing called A Parable of Love
(Love’s Mirror), which captures the young Gabriel and Elizabeth Sid-
dall in a telling pose, allows us to understand the model of creativity
that evidently informed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood17 (Figure 5).
The sketch might more properly be called “A Parable of Art,” as it
serves as an allegory for the way the PRB conceived of the artistic
process, and the extent to which women’s bodies were to be
involved. Rossetti depicts himself as a mentor-artist guiding the hand
of Lizzie Siddall, who appears at once as his pupil and the model for
the portrait he coaches her to produce. The drawing, whose title
identifies the woman at the easel as the artist’s beloved, also suggests
the way that painting a woman and having relations with her often
went hand in hand in the nineteenth century. The Rossetti sketch
underscores the mentor-artist’s intimate involvement in the process
of representing this woman, signaled, for instance, by the placement
of his steady hand (which holds the brush) atop hers. Further, his
gaze in the mirror captures her image and shows him to be watching
her. Siddall’s position as model and object of art, subject to his brush
strokes, is underscored by the fact that he is guiding her to create a
painting that is his image of her: although it is a portrait, it cannot
properly be called a self-portrait. Perhaps the most critical detail, regu-
larly overlooked in discussions of the sketch, is that the paintbrush
appears to be blotting out the eyes of the woman on the canvas: as if
to paint over and thus render useless the organ upon which she
would rely for her artistic vision.18
These two Rossetti images, in which Elizabeth Siddall’s eyes
are respectively closed and blotted out, become all the more

17
Virginia Surtees dates the image 1850, but Jan Marsh notes “the subject matter and
the fact that the lovers are shown in their own intense world, the world of art, surely places
this work as post-1852 when Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal first took up drawing, and probably
locates it in the 1853–54 period, when she was painting her self-portrait under Dante
Gabriel Rossetti’s instructions” (Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, 368).
18
I make this point in Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts (2007). Antonia Losano offers a
similar reading in her excellent study The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature (2008).
Reviving Pre-Raphaelite Women 625

FIGURE 5 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Love's Mirror; or, A Parable of Love, 1850. ©
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.

unsettling when we recognize that Siddall enjoyed a promising


career as a visual artist.19 In fact, contrary to the commonly held
assumption that Rossetti turned Lizzie on to art, the evidence
suggests that Siddall was painting before she met Rossetti and

19
In 1978, Mark Lasner and Roger Lewis published a limited edition of The Poems and
Drawings of Elizabeth Siddal (Wombat Press), which renewed interest in Siddall as artist.
This was the first publication of her poems since William Michael Rossetti’s posthumous
edition, which introduced the poems and gave them titles. In a rather back-handed
compliment, William Rossetti thus acknowledges Lizzie’s talent: “Without overrating her
actual performances in either painting or poetry, one must fairly pronounce her to have
been a woman of unusual capacities, and worthy of being espoused to a painter and poet”
(Marsh, Legend 62). The 1928 Rossetti biographer R. L. Megroz would not even have
granted her that: he blamed Siddall’s frigidity for Rossetti’s well-known infidelities,
claiming she was an unfit match for such a true genius (Marsh, Legend 90–91). Scholarly
attention to Siddall has only intensified in recent years, with a definitive biography by Jan
Marsh and more recently Lucinda Hawksley’s Lizzie Siddal: Face of the Pre-Raphaelites (2004).
626 Emily J. Orlando

began modeling.20 We now know that Siddall showed her draw-


ings to the director of the Government School of Design at
around age 20 (Jiminez 500). After being thereafter “discovered”
by Walter Deverell and agreeing to sit to him, she modeled for
Holman Hunt and Millais, and then, by 1851, exclusively (by
his decree) for Rossetti.21 It is quite possible that Siddall imag-
ined modeling would afford her first-hand access to the art
world and in an important sense it did: through Rossetti,
Siddall met Ford Madox Brown, and later John Ruskin, who, at
Rossetti’s suggestion, became her patron around 1855. Lizzie’s
marvelous artistic potential was recognized by Ruskin and the
painter Barbara Leigh Smith, both of whom called her a
“genius”22 (Hawksley 111, 76). Siddall had little if any formal
art training, though recent findings suggest she studied from
1857 to 1858 at the Sheffield School of Art, which admitted
women (Jiminez 499). Siddall earned money by her art and
was active from the early 1850s. She was the only woman artist
featured at the 1857 Russell Place exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite
art (Marsh, Legend 175), and she actively produced paintings
and drawings up to her death in 1862, leaving behind a com-
pelling body of work.23

20
Jan Marsh’s recent discovery of an obituary of Elizabeth Siddall suggests that she
had demonstrated an artistic gift before meeting Rossetti, who has generally been thought
of as a discoverer and awakener of Lizzie’s talent (Marsh, Legend 160).
21
According to William Holman Hunt’s account, the painter Walter Deverell spied
Siddall in a milliner’s workroom (Marsh, Legend 67). “By Jove!,” Deverell mused, “she’s
like a queen, magnificently tall, with a lovely figure, a stately neck, and a face of the most
delicate and finished modeling; the flow of surface from the temples over the cheeks is
exactly like the carving of a Pheidean [sic] goddess” (67). With only slight modification,
these exclamations might as easily have been uttered by a Hollywood producer or
modeling scout stumbling upon the potential “it girl.”
22
Smith described Lizzie, whose health at the time was failing, in a letter as follows:
“She is a genius and will, if she lives, be a great artist” (Hawksley 76). In a letter to Lizzie
asking her to accept his allowance, Ruskin wrote “The plain hard fact is that I think you
have genius; that I don’t think there is much genius in the world; and I want to keep what
there is, in it, heaven having, I suppose, enough for all its purposes” (Hawksley 111).
23
Siddall’s participation in the exhibition at Russell Place in London was, according
to Jan Marsh, “the high point of her career” (Legend 169). The event, organized by Ford
Madox Brown, also showcased Millais, Hunt, Brown, Rossetti and others, and marked the
first public showing of Siddall’s art. Among her featured works were We are Seven, The
Haunted Tree, and Clerk Saunders, along with drawings inspired by Tennyson and Browning
(Marsh, Legend 193). Siddall also exhibited in a show of British art that toured North
America later in 1857 (Marsh, Legend 59).
Reviving Pre-Raphaelite Women 627

History, of course, has rarely been kind to Elizabeth Siddall’s


artwork. The nineteenth-century painter Arthur Hughes claimed
“Her drawings were beautiful, but without force. They were femi-
nine likenesses of [Rossetti’s] own” (Marsh, Legend 53); Siddall,
in this view, is aligned, as she often was, with feminine weakness,
and it is as if Siddall’s chronic illness has been superimposed onto
her paintings. The idea of Siddall as reflective of weakness was
reinforced by William Michael Rossetti, brother and apologist of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and perhaps the most influential historian
of the Pre-Raphaelites: “Her designs resembled those of Dante
Rossetti at the same date: He had his defects and she had the
deficiencies of those defects.”24 Evelyn Waugh’s early twentieth-
century assessment patronizingly nodded at “her pathetic little
life” and unremarkable drawings with “so little artistic merit and
so much of what one’s governess called ‘feeling’” (Marsh, Legend
86). Even Violet Hunt’s major biography, The Wife of Rossetti, Her
Life and Death (1932), which seemed committed to a sympathetic
approach, all but omitted mention of Siddall’s artistic career
while tellingly excising her name from the volume’s title. Siddall
is thus identified by her role as wife of a great artist and by the
appeal of her short, hard life and sensational overdose, the likes
of which we would later see in Marilyn Monroe.25 John Nicoll
noted in 1970 that while Siddall’s paintings are “technically even
less satisfactory than Rossetti’s, they have exactly the same direct
and personal appeal and, probably because of the extensive help
which he gave her, are closely related to them” (Nicoll 65). One is
reminded here of Percy Lubbock’s famous assessment of Edith
Wharton’s relationship to Henry James: “If she was a novel of his
own she did him credit. . . . All this was much more than her
pretty little literary talent, the handful of clever little fictions of

24
William Michael Rossetti in “Dante Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal, with Facsimiles of
Five Unpublished Drawings by Dante Rossetti in the Collection of Mr. Harold Hartley,”
The Burlington Magazine (March–May, 1903), 278.
25
It is impossible to prove that in overdosing on a (widely used) drug intended to ease
pain and induce sleep, Siddall meant to end her life. Gay Daly and Lucinda Hawksley
acknowledge a suicide note that was to have been pinned on Siddall’s dress and destroyed
by Rossetti and his confidant Ford Madox Brown, to protect Lizzie and the family name. If
the note existed–and Rossetti’s descendants suggest it did–we cannot be sure of its
contents: Violet Hunt’s (melodramatic) biography of Siddall claims it read “My life is so
miserable that I wish for no more of it”; according to Rossetti’s niece and biographer,
Helen Angeli, the note said “Take care of [my brother] Harry” (Marsh, Legend 103, 128).
628 Emily J. Orlando

her own” (Lubbock 21). In this line of thinking, Siddall and


Wharton are products of the great artist’s influence, for better or
worse, and they are decidedly secondary to his canon.26 While it
would be easy to explain these comments as products of their
historical moment, it is perhaps more surprising, given the cur-
rent interest in unearthing and re-reading the neglected work of
women artists, to find a recent essay in The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite
Studies dismissing Siddall’s oeuvre as “meagre” and “artistically
impoverished” (Starzyk 16, 18).
Although Dante Gabriel Rossetti, to his credit, recognized
Siddall’s artistic promise, he seems to have continually put his
stamp on how history would remember her. Four years after she
died, Rossetti thoughtfully prepared portfolios of Siddall’s artistic
output.27 Rossetti had her drawings and sketches photographed
and assembled in folio volumes, some of which survive in whole
or in part:

Into the portfolios were pasted two drawings by Rossetti himself, to repre-
sent the artist [Siddall] in the absence of a portrait photograph. . . . .
When Georgiana Burne-Jones, a friend of Elizabeth’s married years, asked
for a photo as a keepsake, Gabriel replied that no photo of Lizzie had
been preserved, since none had ever been satisfactory; he offered instead
a photo of one of his drawings. (Marsh, Legend 13)

After Lizzie’s funeral, Rossetti burned her letters to him—a not


uncommon gesture to protect the privacy of the deceased—and he
also destroyed every photograph of her that he owned (Daly 93).
In fact, at least two photographs of Siddall survive (Marsh, Legend
13). While it is not known if Rossetti had access to one of the pho-
tos that escaped his fire, it seems fair to say that in offering his
portrait of Siddall, the artist suggests he has accepted his render-
ings of Lizzie as the truest representation of the woman. Scholars

26
While Wharton’s literary triumphs have since been recognized in their own right,
the shadow of the established master weighed heavily for decades following her death in
1937.
27
Jan Marsh describes the surviving portfolios of Siddall’s work as follows: “In total,
sixty-seven items–drawings, sketches, and scraps of sketch–were photographed and recorded,
some of which are extremely faint and exiguous, suggesting that nothing done by
Elizabeth Siddal had been discarded or excluded. Together with the eleven known works
in oil or watercolour, which were not reproduced owing to the poor results expected in
monochrome, this compilation stands as a full record of her work” (Marsh, Legend, 197).
Reviving Pre-Raphaelite Women 629

such as John Nicoll have followed his lead, taking Rossetti’s repre-
sentations of Siddall as fact: “We know what she looked like, both
from her presence as a model in a dozen or more paintings, and
also from the large number of surviving portraits which Rossetti
made of her over the years until her death in 1862” (Nicoll 70).
Nicoll’s assertion does not account for the Elizabeth Siddall that
is lost in translation.
The degree to which Siddall has been filtered through a
painter’s lens is perhaps most poignantly expressed in Rossetti’s
sonnet “The Portrait,” whose speaker, discussing his picture of his
dead beloved, boasts “They that would look on her must come to
me” (Rossetti, House of Life, X). Indeed, for generations we have
had to go through Rossetti to get to Siddall, even to the extent that
she is regularly indexed according to his spelling of her name.
Although her family name was Siddall, Rossetti preferred “Siddal.”
He apparently thought that dropping one “l” would render the
name more refined.28 Researching Siddall’s life and career, one
finds that almost without exception, scholars have adopted
Rossetti’s spelling. The gesture of altering Siddall’s name surely
indicates something of the painter’s desire to possess or at least
exert power over the woman he called his unconscious dove.
Elizabeth Siddall’s still under-acknowledged oeuvre suggests
she was in fact very conscious. Siddall’s art reveals a shrewd aware-
ness of, and distaste for, the passive, disempowering ways that she
and other Pre-Raphaelite women were recorded in visual culture.
Lizzie, as we have seen, was frequently represented in art as
doomed, dead, or hovering at death’s door—not only as Ophelia
and Beatrice, but also the Lady of Shalott, Saint Catherine, and
Francesca from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Rather pointedly, William
Rossetti, never a fan of Lizzie Siddall, praised Millais’s (expiring)
Ophelia as resembling the model more than any other picture
(Hawksley 43), not to mention that he disparaged the sound of
Lizzie’s voice, the implications of which are clear: beautiful
women, when they are to be heard, ought to have voices that are
pleasing to the ear.29

28
William Michael Rossetti explains, in a very matter-of-fact footnote to his discussion
of Elizabeth Siddall: “My brother always spelled the name thus” (“Miss Siddal,” XVII, in
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters with a Memoir, Vol. One, p. 171).
29
“Her voice was clear and low, but with a certain sibilant tendency which reduced its
attractiveness” (William Michael Rossetti, “Miss Siddal,” p. 171).
630 Emily J. Orlando

FIGURE 6 Elizabeth Siddal, Self-Portrait, 1854.

Siddall speaks for herself in her self-portrait, which has little


in common with Millais’s drowning tragedienne, nor does it
resemble the numerous drawings and paintings by Rossetti. The
artist left behind a startling self-portrait that illuminates the con-
siderable gap between “Siddal” as she was depicted by Rossetti
and Siddall as she envisioned herself (Figure 6). Dated 1854, her
first oil painting is a sobering, unromanticized image of Elizabeth
Siddall. The picture more closely resembles the surviving photo-
graphs of Lizzie Siddall than the Pre-Raphaelite works for which
she modeled and is thus more “true to nature” than the art of the
PRB had sought to be. Though the woman’s face is pale, it looks
neither waxen nor unearthly. The female subject seems wise
beyond her years—considerably more mature than the young girl
of Ophelia, painted two years earlier. While the flee-flowing tresses
in Rossetti’s depictions of Lizzie suggests physical intimacy, given
that a lady would let down her hair only for her husband or
children, in this self-portrait, the woman’s braided, conservatively
coiffed hair suggests she is safeguarding her sexuality. Her gar-
ments also suggest a marked guardedness: she is not clothed in the
bohemian, uncorseted gowns in which we often see her but instead
appears in a high-necked, white-collared black dress, as though
ready for church or school. The expression on her face pointedly
suggests disenchantment, and the fact that the viewer is drawn to
her eyes—with their austere, formidable look—underscores
Reviving Pre-Raphaelite Women 631

Siddall’s commitment to representing herself as an active


gazer rather than a passive beauty. We see very little of her
body, and what we do see is fully clothed, an editorial choice
that discourages the implied gazer from objectifying her. Sid-
dall seems to be reacting against what Antonia Losano has
called “the persistent eroticization of the woman artist
throughout the nineteenth century” (49). As if answering her
own call in her poem “A Silent Wood,” Siddall resists the com-
pulsion to represent the female subject as fainting, dying, or
swooning.
Siddall’s revisionary project is also evident in her interpreta-
tion of the ubiquitous theme of “The Lady of Shalott.” In 1853,
Siddall’s drawing by that name was one of the earliest artistic
representations of Tennyson’s beloved poem. (Edward Moxon’s
illustrated volume of Tennyson poems would appear four years
later.) In Tennyson’s narrative, the luckless lady is confined to a
tower on the isle of Shalott, forbidden to look down to Camelot,
with weaving as her only occupation:

There she weaves by night and day


A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.

Of course, it does not end well for Tennyson’s lady who, “half sick
of shadows” for watching the world through a mirror, takes the
forbidden glance to Camelot and pays with her life. The most
popular visual interpretations of the poem, by John William
Waterhouse, Arthur Hughes, and other Victorian painters, cap-
ture her floating down to Camelot–drifting, declining, and/or
already dead:

Under tower and balcony,


By garden-wall and gallery,
A gleaming shape she floated by,
Dead-pale between the houses high,
Silent into Camelot.
Out upon the wharfs they came,
Knight and Burgher, Lord and Dame,
And around the prow they read her name,
The Lady of Shalott.
632 Emily J. Orlando

In the paintings by Waterhouse and his nineteenth-century peers,


the lady is translated as an exquisite corpse to be gazed upon and
mourned. Rossetti himself would produce an illustration of “The
Lady of Shalott” (1857) for Moxon’s edition of Tennyson in which
Lancelot gazes upon the deceased Lady whose death he has
unknowingly precipitated. The model for Rossetti’s Lady seems to
have been Siddall herself. Siddall, in her sketch produced before
Rossetti’s, proactively captures a much earlier moment in the
poem. The fact that the lady is represented as alive is revisionary in
itself. In her account, Tennyson’s subject appears visibly alert, eyes
open, and sitting upright. Siddall’s snapshot of the Lady of Shalott
presents her as an active gazer: having just spied the strapping,
shining silhouette of Sir Lancelot in her mirror, the lady turns to
take the forbidden glance outside (Figure 7). Her gesture of
looking out the window, suggestive of windows of possibility, looks
forward to the work of Marie Spartali, produced a generation later
and discussed below. Siddall, herself a woman who has been most

FIGURE 7 Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (Lizzie) (1834–62), The Lady of Shalott,


1853 (ink on paper) (b/w photo), Private Collection/© The Maas Gallery,
London/UK/ The Bridgeman Art Library, Nationality/copyright status: English/
out of copyright.
Reviving Pre-Raphaelite Women 633

remembered as an object of the gaze rather than an agent of it,


significantly has positioned her subject actively looking.30 It is the
subject’s most assertive act in the poem, and Siddall’s decision to
depict the lady’s activity rather than her beautiful passivity (as a
corpse) is an important step forward.
In fact, when we compare Siddall’s female subject in “The
Lady of Shalott” to the image of Elizabeth in Rossetti’s A Parable
of Love, it seems that Siddall is re-drawing Rossetti’s picture of
her (Figure 5). She is also, in a sense, anticipating Rossetti’s
illustration of the lovely, lifeless Lady of Shalott for which she
would later pose. First, in Siddall’s sketch, the woman’s hair, a
signifier for her sexuality, is pulled behind her shoulders. Fur-
ther, there is no mentor-artist present to guide the lady’s hand
as she creates her art. While Siddall’s artistic eye is metaphori-
cally eclipsed in Rossetti’s Parable, in the woman artist’s picture
of the Lady of Shalott, which is arguably a picture of herself,
looking is the most important action. What is more, the mirror in
front of the lady’s loom is shattered, and that shattering sug-
gests a rejection of the way in which Siddall’s own image has
been recorded on Pre-Raphaelite canvases. The nod to Ros-
setti’s sketch is particularly clear when we consider the looking-
glass in Rossetti’s Parable, in which the young Rossetti is seen to
be fixedly gazing at Siddall, guiding her as she paints a picture
(his picture) of herself. The lady in Siddall’s drawing is creating
art at her loom and she is nothing like the typically heavy-
lidded, drowsy damsel we expect to see in a Pre-Raphaelite
image. Siddall’s re-drawing of the Lady of Shalott, which empha-
sizes vision and the creative process, functions as a progressive
act of self-portraiture.
Taken together, Siddall’s “Lady of Shalott” and Rossetti’s
Parable of Art also suggest a visual analogue for (1) the way in which

30
Elaine Shefer in her examination of Siddall’s “Lady of Shalott” suggests, on the
contrary, that “She is woman as object: The Lady of Shalott is she who is seen rather than
she who sees” (Shefer 26). “For The Lady of Shalott, Elizabeth chose the dress that
Christina wore in [Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s] The Girlhood [of Mary Virgin] because, in her
self-portrait, she wanted to identify with the image that Christina symbolized in the latter
work: the innocent, pure, and modest virgin. By identifying with an image that Dante Gabriel
Rossetti had so lovingly portrayed, Siddal once again played the conventional role of
servicing the needs of the Victorian man; namely, satisfying his dream of the ideal woman”
(Shefer 28). I see Siddall as far more revolutionary in her depiction of the Lady of Shalott.
634 Emily J. Orlando

Pre-Raphaelite women artists confronted a fixed set of rules


governing how, what, and whether or not they might paint and
exhibit, and (2) the extent to which their function as artists and
not models has been dropped out of most art histories. Ruskin,
the acknowledged Dean of nineteenth-century art criticism, lent
his voice to what many must have been thinking when he noted
that “no woman could paint”–that is, he seemed to suggest, they
could not paint great pictures.31 Even though this attitude was
challenged, and Ruskin was a supporter of Siddall’s work, women
came up against preconceived notions of their limited artistic
capabilities as well as deeply-entrenched ideas on how and what
they ought to paint (if they were to paint at all). Observing the
work of the painter Marie Spartali, William Michael Rossetti
parenthetically suggested that “like most of her sex” she is “not
gifted with a strong eye for form,” a criticism that actually speaks
more to the limitations imposed upon women–who were prohib-
ited from studying the nude model and thus acquiring an eye for
form–than their fundamental weakness.32 It was generally under-
stood that women should paint in a soft-spoken, “feminine”
manner (Marsh and Nunn 26). Women painters were encour-
aged to confine themselves to landscapes, still lifes, domestic
scenes, or narratives drawn from history, poetry, or religion
(Elliott 210). Large, grand scale pictures were seen to be unlady-
like (Marsh and Nunn 27), perhaps in the same way that women
were (and still are) discouraged from making “exhibitions” of
themselves. Modesty and humility were thought to be virtues of
True Womanhood.33 Further, “[w]atercolors were regarded as
feminine and therefore insignificant; oil, which is harder to
handle, was perceived as a man’s medium, the vehicle for serious

31
Marsh/Nunn, p. 25. Ruskin, in Modern Painters, had claimed that “a great painter
must necessarily be a man of strong and perfect physical constitution” (Vol. 2, 1866–84,
2: 78).
32
William Michael Rossetti, “English Painters of the Present Day,” Portfolio 8, quoted
in Elliott, p. 209.
33
Antonia Losano notes in her study of women painters in Victorian literature that
“women painters (like many other professional women) faced intense ideological
disapproval because of their participation in the public realm. . . . Whereas women writers
could and often did remain anonymous, carrying out their trade at discreet distance in
modest solitude, a painter couldn’t very well hide her endeavors. Paint and paintings have
a visible (and olfactory) physical presence; brushes and paint pots can’t be whisked out of
the way at a moment’s notice; canvases and easels take up space” (33).
Reviving Pre-Raphaelite Women 635

pictures” (Daly 78).34 Marriage and the call of domesticity further


imposed limits on the woman who would paint. If a woman artist did
marry, unless it was to another artist, it often meant the end of her
career, as her primary focus would necessarily become domestic, not
artistic, pursuits.35 Exhibiting one’s work presented another set of
hurdles, as the major exhibition halls were not predisposed to featur-
ing women artists.36 In spite of all of this, as Jan Marsh and Pamela
Gerrish Nunn have shown, women were very active in “shaping,
defining, developing, and perpetuating the [Pre-Raphaelite] move-
ment over its half-century” (9). Yet until recently, women artists have
been dropped out of the history of Pre-Raphaelitism, with Siddall,
usually in her function as model, as a frequent exception. Even
newly developed canons of women artists37 overlook or undermine
the involvement of women in the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
Given the boundaries that were erected around female artistic
experience, it is perhaps not surprising that Marie Spartali
(1844–1927), like Siddall and other women of the Pre-Raphaelite

34
Marie Spartali worked primarily in watercolor or gouache, which was “for the most
part the preference of many other serious women painters of the era (though her friend
and contemporary Evelyn De Morgan chose tempera, and Emma Sandys worked largely in
oils)” (Elliott 206).
35
One finds the struggle of the nineteenth-century woman artist (and her complicated re-
lation to marriage) illustrated in such literary narratives as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora
Leigh, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Story of Avis. A real-life
example is found in the painter Harriet Hosmer (1830–1908), for whom marriage and career
were incompatible: she looked forward to better times when “it will not be thought strange
that women should be preachers and sculptors, and every one who comes after us will have to
bear fewer and fewer blows” (Hosmer, Daughters of America, 1883, quoted in Heller, p. 73).
36
By the mid-nineteenth century, there were six principal exhibiting bodies in London,
the Royal Academy being the premier venue. All were to various degrees unwelcoming
towards women (Marsh/Nunn 46). However, women artists had success showing their work at
annual exhibitions in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Bristol (46). Additionally, as
Antonia Losano notes, “The founding of the Society of Female Artists in 1856 (as well as sever-
al other women-only galleries) smoothed the path for numerous women painters. . . . The soci-
ety offered struggling women artists a London venue to introduce their work to the public; it
also offered established women artists a place to send small sketches or studies to gather mea-
ger but much-needed profits. The SFA provided many women a stepping stone to more presti-
gious galleries” (Losano 30–31). Although it was not impossible for a woman to have a picture
accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy, women were not granted membership to the
RA until the early twentieth century (31).
37
While we always run the risk of oversight when we assemble a canon, the recently pub-
lished 50 Women Artists You Should Know, edited by Christiane Weideman et al. does not in-
clude any Pre-Raphaelite women (New York: Prestel, 2008). Pre-Raphaelite women artists are
also absent from Nancy G. Heller’s Women Artists: An Illustrated History, nor are they represent-
ed in the collection at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC.
636 Emily J. Orlando

circle, would, in her lifetime, be most valued as an artist’s model.


Spartali posed for the first Rossetti painting that the collector
Samuel Bancroft saw and left him “shocked with delight.” She
and her sister were celebrated beauties who were sought out as
models by the painters James M. Whistler, Rossetti, Burne-Jones,
and Ford Madox Brown and the photographer Julia Margaret
Cameron.38 (The poet A. C. Swinburne, also an admirer of Lizzie
Siddall, was known to have been so struck by the young Marie’s
beauty that he had to “sit down and cry” [Jiminez 514].) John
Singer Sargent, the eminent society portraitist, sought without
success to paint Marie, and her refusal suggests something of her
desire to be remembered as more than a model (Elliott 134).39
Even by the time she had established a reputation as a remarkably
accomplished painter, Spartali was praised, in a newspaper
column describing an 1889 event at the Royal Academy, for her
“beautiful and picture-like head” rather than for her beautiful
pictures (Jiminez 515)–a comment that, like Sargent’s desire to
paint her, suggests a cultural blindness to the tendency to
relegate women artists to the status of objets d’art.40
What is often forgotten is that Spartali made her promising
artistic debut before she started modeling for her artist-friends.
Spartali’s impressive artistic career spanned six decades. As David
B. Elliott has noted in the only extant biography of the painter
(which examines her in tandem with her journalist-artist
husband), Spartali “was unusual for an aspiring woman artist in
not being the daughter or sister of an established male artist. . . .
Her resolve to paint and her dedication to her art were entirely
her own” (33). Spartali got her start in the mid-1860s as the

38
Marie and her younger sister Christina Spartali, known for their unusual beauty,
were pursued by a band of male artists–Whistler, Rossetti, Thomas Armstrong, and
George du Maurier–on a summer afternoon. As Armstrong recalled, “We were all à genoux
before them . . . and of course every one of us burned with a desire to try to paint them”
(Jiminez 510).
39
Sargent, a friend of Marie Spartali, said of her that “she looked most beautiful the
other day in my studio, in large folds of black, with her pale face” (Pennell, E.R. & J. Life of
James Whistler, 1908, Heinemann, qtd. in Elliott 134).
40
An obituary for Marie Spartali Stillman, which devoted an inordinate amount of
space to praising her loveliness of person, suggesting no photograph ever did her justice,
offered the following assessment of her career: “it can hardly be said that she had high
creative power, and her mastery over the technique of art was never very complete”
(Victorian Art in Britain: http://www.victorianartinbritain.co.uk/biog/stillman.htm, 1 August
2008).
Reviving Pre-Raphaelite Women 637

student of Ford Madox Brown and throughout her career


acknowledged Brown for his encouragement and instruction
(Elliott 208). As is the case with Elizabeth Siddall, she has often
been read as a lesser version of her mentor. In 1889, the critic F. G.
Stephens wrote of Spartali that she was “a Rossetti translated, if that
were possible, by Mr. Ford Madox Brown.”41 From 1877 to 1887
Spartali was a regular contributor to the (avant garde) Grosvenor
Gallery, and its successor the New Gallery. Her work was also fea-
tured at the Dudley Gallery, the much-coveted Royal Academy, as
well as various venues in the Eastern United States and Rome. She is
known to have completed at least 170 pictures (Elliott 206). Her
early paintings—for example, Antigone (1871)—reveal consciously
feminist and political themes (Marsh and Nunn 131).
Spartali’s commitment to re-presenting women as creative,
empowered agents is evident in her watercolor titled Mariana
(1868), which shows her to be revising John Everett Millais’s
celebrated work by the same name (1851). First, let us consider
how Millais has depicted the maiden Mariana who came to
Victorians from Shakespeare by way of Tennyson (Figure 8).
Millais’s Mariana is, like so many Pre-Raphaelite women,
entrapped, and her confinement is suggested by the furniture
before and behind her and the closed windows, all of which serve
to box her in. Indeed, when Millais’s Mariana looks to the
window, she confronts a stained glass image of the Annunciation.
By virtue of depicting an angel and a mother-to-be, the colorful
window reminds Mariana of two of the most important roles
available to Victorian women. Millais has chosen to position his
Mariana in a rather provocative pose, accentuating her curves
and the arch of her spine: she is stretching, perhaps taking a
break from her needlework, and her posture also suggests her
yearning for Angelo, who has abandoned her. When Millais first
exhibited the painting at the Royal Academy, in 1851, it was
accompanied by four lines from Tennyson’s 1830 poem:

She only said, “My life is dreary,


He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!” (Upstone 44)

41
Athenaeum, 25 May 1889, p. 669.
638 Emily J. Orlando

FIGURE 8 Sir John Everett Millais, Mariana, 1851 © Tate, London 2009.

Millais’s heroine, then, is presented as world-weary, bereft, and


yearning for death, as though she might be one step removed
from Tennyson’s “dead-pale” Lady of Shalott. As if taking a cue
from Siddall’s recuperative act of self-portraiture, Spartali has re-
imagined Millais’s picture. The body of Spartali’s Mariana is
neither contorted nor twisted in anguish, as we might expect
from a woman deserted by her lover and sentenced to solitary
Reviving Pre-Raphaelite Women 639

confinement.42 Spartali has modestly refrained from featuring


Mariana’s breasts and hips–indeed, they are cropped out of the
picture–in a gesture that discourages the viewer from objectifying
her. She appears neither “dreary” nor “aweary.” Indeed, Spartali’s
Mariana, whose eyes are open and whose hands are folded in
what is perhaps hopeful prayer, acquires access to a window, and
that window is open.
Spartali’s revisionist project is perhaps most clear when we
compare her depiction of Beatrice to the beatified Beatrice of
Rossetti. Now identified by her married name, Marie Spartali
Stillman, she has effectively revived Beatrice.43 Like her Mariana,
her Beatrice (1895) presents a woman who is deep in thought
(Figure 9). Spartali’s Beatrice is engaged in reading, eyes
open, her pointed right hand directing our gaze away from
her body (unlike Rossetti’s Venus Verticordia) and toward a lit-
erary text, much in the way the artist has positioned her Saint
Barbara as a reader (and not a martyr) in her 1870 painting.
The painter seems to have placed herself in her picture of
Beatrice, for the female subject bears a striking resemblance to
the woman we see in Spartali’s self-portrait (Figure 10). As
such, Spartali presents herself in this watercolor as a kind
of Renaissance woman. Perhaps most crucially, Spartali’s
Beatrice is not laid out on the burial bier, as we find her in
Rossetti’s Dante’s Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice, a
painting she knew well, having posed as one of Beatrice’s
attendants. Nor is Spartali’s Beatrice represented in a (rather
eroticized) death scene, as in Beata Beatrix. Like Siddall, this
painter is working inter-textually, locating more empowering
images within the classic text (by Tennyson, by Dante) with
which to align herself.
Like Spartali and Siddall, the accomplished painter Evelyn
Pickering de Morgan (1855–1919) evidently was invested in revising

42
Spartali’s Mariana, now in a private collection, is reproduced at http://www.1st-art-
gallery.com/_site/paintings/174001-174500/174019/size3.jpg.
43
Spartali also seems to have revised Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s image of Fiammetta, for
which she modeled. Rossetti’s A Vision of Fiammetta (1878), which has about it something
of the slickness of Venus Verticordia, was followed by Marie Spartali Stillman’s Fiammetta
Singing (1879). Both pictures engage Boccaccio’s figure of Fiammetta, though Spartali’s
image shows the female figure practicing the art of singing while Rossetti’s shows her as a
vision of delight.
640 Emily J. Orlando

FIGURE 9 Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927), Beatrice, 1895, Gouache on


paper, 22 11/16 × 17 in. (57.6 × 43.2 cm), Delaware Art Museum, Gift of Mrs.
Walter Reinsel, 1971.

the way Pre-Raphaelite women were represented.44 De Morgan in


her 1904 portrait of Jane Morris presents a rare glimpse of Jane
that we do not find in Dante Rossetti’s repertoire. When we turn
to Rossetti’s La Pia de’ Tolomei or Proserpine, we see Jane as she was

44
De Morgan studied at the Slade School of Art and was a founding exhibitor of the
Grosvenor Art Gallery, where she showed her work alongside Burne-Jones, George
Frederick Watts, and Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema (http://www.demorgan.org.uk/, 22 August
2008).
Reviving Pre-Raphaelite Women 641

FIGURE 10 Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927), Self-Portrait, 1871, Charcoal


and white chalk on paper, 25 × 20 1/4 in. (63.5 × 51.4 cm), Delaware Art
Museum, Gift of Lucia N. Valentine, 1974.

most often brought to us: a disempowered, ensnared, melancholy


muse drawn from Dante, bereft of hope and possibility. In de
Morgan’s portrait, an unusually silver-haired Jane, head resting
against pillow, looks mature and dignified.45 By the time the por-
trait was taken, Jane had outlived both Rossetti, who had immor-
talized her in his art, and William Morris, the husband beside
whom she worked as an embroiderer. Far from the doomed
damozel captured in Rossetti’s paintings, this woman strikes one
as a wise old soul. De Morgan’s picture, produced toward the
end of her subject’s life, effectively revises Rossetti’s images, rep-
resenting the model not as she fills the Pre-Raphaelite artist’s

45
De Morgan’s portrait of Jane Morris is available at http://images.bridgeman.co.uk/
cgi-bin/bridgemanImage.cgi/600.WDM.779780.7055475/84798.JPG.
642 Emily J. Orlando

dream, but rather more like the flesh-and-blood woman that she
was. De Morgan depicts the seasoned Jane Morris without preten-
sion or artifice, and she takes up her subject at an age when her
looks would no longer have the currency they once did. While de
Morgan’s Jane appears admittedly world-weary, her weariness is
presented as neither glamorous nor sexy.
A final pair of images depicting the painter Marie Spartali fur-
ther speaks to the ways in which the women of the Pre-Raphaelite
circle reclaimed their own images and spoke for themselves in
their art. Dante Rossetti’s Portrait of Miss Marie Spartali is shrouded
in shadows.46 The woman’s arms and hands are withheld from
view, a choice that seems particularly important given that
Spartali by this time was working as a painter. Her face is a work
of art, a beauty to behold. She bears the signature long neck,
sorrowful eyes, heavy tresses, and impossibly rosy lips of the
Rossetti stunner. When we turn to Marie Spartali’s 1871 charcoal
and white chalk on paper, we see the artist represented by her
own hand (Figure 10). (Spartali would recreate her self-portrait
in watercolor three years later.) In this self-portrait of the artist as
a young woman, the subject strikes us as regal and contempla-
tive.47 In fact, the strategically placed fan in her left hand,
inscribed with the word “history,” re-directs our gaze away from
her body and compels us to contemplate the ways in which this
woman artist might be re-writing (art) history. As in Siddall’s
“Lady of Shalott,” which shows the woman working at her loom,
here the hands of the female subject are featured, as if to privi-
lege the hands of the artist who created the self-portrait. While
modern-day viewers might wish to see the Victorian woman artist
painting herself as a confident force with which to be reckoned,
one finds instead something more tentative. The woman in
Spartali’s self-portrait bears a face expressing uncertainty and her
right hand, likely the hand that holds the brush, is partially
tucked inside the sleeve of her dress in a rather protective

46
The Rossetti image is available at http://www.rossettiarchive.org/img/
thumbs_big/s519.m.jpg.
47
Jan Marsh, in her entry on Spartali in The Dictionary of Artists’ Models, writes of the
painter that “Her own self-image, depicted in works such as The Lady Prays–Desire (1867)
and Antigone (1871), is less flattering” (514). I would add that Spartali’s female subjects
appear less sexually objectified, which is revisionary in light of the tendency to eroticize
the female subject, and particularly the artistic female subject, in visual culture.
Reviving Pre-Raphaelite Women 643

gesture. Withholding her hands suggests a reluctance, perhaps


the “reticence,” “timidity,” and lack of confidence which the
artist’s friends ascribed to the woman they knew (Elliott 219).
Marie Spartali in her self-portrait, like Elizabeth Siddall in hers,
presents an image that suggests guardedness, caution, and
perhaps uncertainty as to how history will remember her. At the
same time, by virtue of creating a self-portrait, the painter is
presenting her own self–a creature whose vibrancy is echoed by
the plant behind her, the rich fabric of her gown, and the fan she
holds—rather than casting herself as Ophelia, Proserpine, or
Beatrice Portinari. She is defining herself as an individual within
a visual culture that prefers to imagine women as beautiful,
passive idols to be worshipped, as Siddall had put it, like frozen
things of stone.
As we have seen, the women of the Pre-Raphaelite circle
engaged in a dialogue with their artistic brothers that resonates
powerfully today. The longer of Dante Rossetti’s two poems
called “The Portrait” had boasted “[t]his is her picture as she
was,” as if to discount the distance between the woman painted
by her male admirer and the woman as she might have painted
herself. “And yet,” the speaker reminds us at the end of the first
stanza, “the earth is over her.” Because she has expired, it fol-
lows that she cannot verbally or visually speak for herself. In
Sonnet X of Dante Rossetti’s The House of Life, also titled “The
Portrait,” the speaker claims “They that would look on her must
come to me.” Elizabeth Siddall and her sister-artists suggest that
they that would look on her might turn elsewhere. These
women lend their voices to Christina Rossetti’s chorus when she
says, in her own sonnet, that the so-called “portrait” is decidedly
not her picture as she was but rather as she filled the artist’s
dream—a dream tainted by death, sickness, paleness, languor,
and voyeurism. These leanings toward necrophilia are alive and
well today, as seen in the prevalence of beautiful female corpses
on the small and big screen. Poignant examples are found in
such recent films as The Dead Girl, The Black Dahlia, Moulin
Rouge, The Return of the Sith, such highly rated television shows as
Law and Order: SVU and CSI, and the media spectacles encircling
the violent, untimely deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson, Chandra
Levy, JonBenet Ramsey, Princess Diana, Laci Peterson, Natalee
Holloway, and the Russian Rapunzel with which this essay
644 Emily J. Orlando

began. Perhaps not even Wilde’s Lord Henry would have imag-
ined the alarming extent to which such “wonders” remain not
only possible but conspicuously entertaining for twenty-first-
century consumers of popular culture. That these images have
retained their allure, in a postmodern world that has also been
called “post-feminist”—as if to suggest that second-wave feminism
is a fait accompli—underscores the weight of what these nine-
teenth-century women artists were up against. The fact that
these Victorian women moved that much further beyond the
role of model, re-presenting themselves as live, active, conscious
beings, rather than embodying, like Ruslana Korshunova,
“something out of a fairytale,” suggests that their cultural work
was far ahead of its time. The women orbiting the Pre-Raphael-
ite Brotherhood managed to re-work these disempowering
tropes and fill their own respective dreams of self-possession
and self-portraiture. They bequeathed to us a body of work that
represented themselves, lest they be (mis)represented. They
overturned the creative paradigm as if to say “they that would
look on me must come to me.”

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