Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal
Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (born July 25, 1829 in Holborn , London , † February 11, 1862 in London) was an English painter and poet, the favorite model of the Pre-Raphaelites and the wife of the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti .
Family origin
Elizabeth Siddal's last name was actually Siddall, but she preferred, probably at Rossetti's suggestion, the spelling with just an "l". She was born in 1829 as the third of eight children. Her parents, Sheffield ironmonger Charles Crooke Siddall , and mother Elizabeth Eleanor Evans had been married since December 13, 1824.
The Pre-Raphaelite Model
Siddal was discovered in 1849 by the painter Walter Deverell in a fashion store where she worked as a hatter. Her delicate, fragile beauty and her waist-length, copper-colored hair quickly made her perhaps the most important model of the Pre-Raphaelites, as she personified their feminine ideal like hardly any other woman.
In the following years she was the model for William Holman Hunt (among others as Sylvia in Zwei Herren aus Verona ) and for John Everett Millais (as Ophelia ). For this famous painting, which depicts the drowning Ophelia from Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet , Siddal posed in a bathtub, fully dressed in an embroidered dress. Since the painting was made in the winter of 1851/52, Millais had placed oil lamps under the bathtub to keep the water warm. But once the lights went out and the bath water slowly turned ice cold. Millais was so absorbed in his painting that he didn't notice it, and Siddal took her work as a model so seriously that she didn't want to tear Millais out of his inspiration and said nothing. After that incident, however, Siddal fell seriously ill with a cold or even pneumonia, and her father threatened Millais with a lawsuit. For Hunt, Siddal didn't like to model any more, since he had, for fun, persuaded the painter John Tupper that she was his wife. From 1852 onwards, Siddal only served Dante Gabriel Rossetti as a model, who immortalized her in many drawings and pictures.
The painter and poet
Art critic John Ruskin has paid Siddal a generous annual grant since 1854 that allowed her to focus on painting. Rossetti taught and supported her artistically. Siddal illustrated motifs from medieval legends, Sir Walter Scott's stories and from William Wordsworth and Alfred Tennyson's poems in the form of ink and pencil drawings or as watercolors . She also painted a number of oil paintings, including a self-portrait (1854), on which she portrayed herself unadorned and not uncritical. She exhibited for the first time at the Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition in Russell Place in 1857, albeit without any sales success. Only some of her pictures have survived to this day.
Siddal also wrote fifteen poems, all of which revolved around melancholy subjects; in the final verse of "Dead Love" (1859), for example, she doubts the possibility of true love:
- If the merest dream of love were true
- Then, sweet, we should be in heaven,
- And this is only earth, my dear,
- Where true love is not given.
The lover and wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Siddal had been Dante Gabriel Rossetti's lover since 1852. He called her by the nickname "Guggum". For a long time, however, Rossetti could not make up his mind to marry, as Siddal did not meet his parents' expectations and he himself felt drawn to other “muses” such as Ruth Herbert, Annie Miller and Fanny Cornforth. In 1858 there was even a separation from Elizabeth Siddal; as a result, her health deteriorated, also because of her dependence on the opium-containing drug laudanum . When she was so ill at the beginning of 1860 that she could not get out of bed at times and it was expected that she would end soon, Rossetti finally decided to marry her. The marriage took place on May 23, 1860 at St. Clement's Church in Hastings . Happy honeymoons in Paris and Boulogne followed.
Siddal became pregnant, but her pregnancy tragically ended on May 2, 1861 with the stillbirth of a girl, which affected her very much. Just as she was pregnant for the second time in 1862, Siddal died of an overdose of laudanum. It was suicide because she had left a suicide note, which Rossetti burned on the advice of the painter Ford Madox Brown in order not to expose Siddal as a suicide to social ostracism and the refusal of a church burial. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery (West) in London. Rossetti was seriously thrown off course by the death of his wife. He believed that her spirit haunted him every night and tried to contact her at spiritualistic seances . In his famous painting Beata Beatrix (first version 1863, second version 1870), Rossetti depicted Elizabeth Siddal as praying Beatrice ( Dante's transfigured lover).
The exhumation
In 1862 Rossetti had placed a manuscript with his poems in Siddal's coffin, of which he otherwise had no copies. He let the notebook slide between Siddal's flowing red hair, evidently in the (erroneous) belief that after her death he would never be able to write poetry again. In 1869 Rossetti made the decision to publish his poems. Therefore, he appealed to the British Home Secretary to be allowed to exhume the coffin and was given permission to do so. To avoid public attention, Siddal's coffin was dug up and opened in the middle of the night. Rossetti himself was not present, only his agent Charles Augustus Howell. This then spread the false rumor that Siddal's body had not decayed and that her hair had grown and filled the whole coffin, probably to gloss over the macabre fact of the exhumation. The book of poems was found with slight traces of worm damage and was published by Rossetti together with more recent poems that he had composed after 1862 (Rossetti: Poems , 1870), but was not well received by the critics because of their erotic content.
Trivia
- The British spoken word artist Anne Clark selected the painting by Beata Beatrix for the cover artwork of her 1982 debut “The Sitting Room”.
- The Ethereal band "Siddal" was named after Elizabeth Siddal.
- The French writer Philippe Delerm (* 1950) deals with Elizabeth Siddal in the novel "Blauseidener Pfau" (French original title: Autumn , 1998).
literature
- Lucinda Hawksley: Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel , London: André Deutsch 2004. 230 pp. ISBN 0-233-00050-X .
- Jan Marsh: The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal . London: Quartet 1989. 244 pp. ISBN 0-7043-0170-9 .
- Poems and Drawings of Elizabeth Siddal , edited by Roger C. Lewis and Mark Samuels Lasner. Wolfville, Nova Scotia: Wombat Press 1978. ISBN 0-9690828-0-0 .
- Günter Metken: Pre-Raphaelites . Baden-Baden 1973. pp. 180-182, 223-225.
- Eleonore Reichert: Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal. Life and work of a Victorian painter . (Dissertation) Giessen 1972. 116 pp.
- Virginia Surtees: Rossetti's Portraits of Elizabeth Siddal , Aldershot: Scolar Press 1991. 63 pp. ISBN 0-85967-885-7 .
Web links
- The website LizzieSiddal.com, dedicated to Elizabeth (Lizzie) Siddal
- Selected poems by Elizabeth Siddal
- Rossetti's portraits by Elizabeth Siddal
- A Belgian website about Elizabeth Siddal (with three of her paintings shown at the bottom of the page)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Siddal, Elizabeth Eleanor |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Siddall, Elizabeth Eleanor |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | English painter and poet |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 25, 1829 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Holborn , London |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 11, 1862 |
| Place of death | London |