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EMILY J. ORLANDO
Reviving
Emily J. Orlando
Pre-Raphaelite Women
Fairfield University
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
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
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.
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:
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
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)
FIGURE 4 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, circa 1864–70 © Tate, London
2009.
622 Emily J. Orlando
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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)
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
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:
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
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
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
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
41
Athenaeum, 25 May 1889, p. 669.
638 Emily J. Orlando
FIGURE 8 Sir John Everett Millais, Mariana, 1851 © Tate, London 2009.
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
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
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
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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