Dante Gabriel Rossetti(1828-1882) - PRB (Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) ჯგუფის ერთ-ერთი დამაარსებელი - Portrait of Elizabeth Siddal
"The unhappy woman who inspired, loved, and was loved by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Siddal was brought up in London, the daughter of a Sheffield cutler who had moved South. Her father seems to have been a self-employed small businessman. She was first spotted by Walter Howard Deverell an associate of the Pre-Raphaelites working in a milliners shop. Deverell was so taken with her striking appearance, that he enlisted the aid of his mother to recruit Lizzie as a model. She became a favourite early model of the PRB, who referred to her as ‘Guggums’ or ‘ The Sid.’
The first really famous painting in which Lizzie appeared was Ophelia, by John Everett Millais. The subject of the painting is Ophelia, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet drowning herself, after Hamlet’s murder of her father. Millais purchased a lady’s dress of great age for the large sum of £4.00, and Lizzie posed in it lying in a tin bath full of water. To heat the bath, the painter placed it on tressles with oil lamps underneath. Unfortunately the preoccupied painter failed to realise the lamps had gone out. The water then went cold, and poor Lizzie caught a bad cold due to the low temperature of the water. The painting is quite simply one of the greatest produced anywhere in the 19th century. Unlike some other images, seeing it ‘in the flesh,’ is not a disappointment. It is worth noting that Rossetti’s brother William, a good judge, was of the opinion that it was the best actual likeness of Lizzie Siddal ever produced. She was also a model for William Holman Hunt. Shortly after this, however, the relationship between Lizzie and Rossetti deepened, and henceforth he monopolised her as a sitter.
Elizabeth Siddal became the muse of Rossetti. They lived together in an exclusive, claustrophobic relationship, which was not, I think, sexually consummated at that time. The painter repeatdly painted and drew her, the pencil drawings of the listless, unhealthy, but beautiful sitter being some of the artist’s most successful works to date. In the mid 1850s, Lizzie’s health deteriorated alarmingly. John Ruskin, who encouraged her artistic ambitions, made her an allowance, allowing her to visit Europe for her health. Her relationship with Rossetti started to cool, and she became more independent of him. In 1861, though, Rossetti and Elizabeth were married. Georgiana Bourne-Jones has left behind a record of Elizabeth Siddal at this time, showing her to be a pleasant, intelligent, normal woman. In 1861 she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. A full-term pregnancy, a dead baby, and deteriorating health, how unspeakably sad. On February the 12th 1862, Elizabeth Siddal died of an overdose of laudanum. Madox Brown was called by the frantic Rossetti, to help with his unconscious wife. He removed, and destroyed a note pinned to her nightgown, asking that her brother be looked after, so there is little doubt her death was suicide.
Elizabeth Siddal was buried in the Rossetti family plot in Highgate Cemetery. Unhappily this was not the end of this tragic story.
Following Elizabeth’s death Rossetti moved to the house in Cheyne Walk where he lived for the rest of his life. He painted Beata Beatrix between 1864 and 1870, ostensibly a tribute to the wife of Dante, but in reality to his own dead wife. The dying Lizzie is shown in ecstatic anticipation of her impending death, with a dove dropping a poppy, a symbol of death into her hands. This painting, like Ophelia, is one of the greatest, and most tragic images of the 19th century. A fitting memorial to the great love between the artist and the woman who was his inspiration.
Rossetti had thrown into his wife’s coffin, a manuscript copy of many of his poems. Encouraged by his disreputable friend, Charles Augustus Howell, the painter had Lizzie’s body exhumed to recover his poems. From this bizarre and highly morbid event came the mental problems which destroyed Rossetti, who started to suffer from insomnia. Ultimately Elizabeth Siddal’s death, and disinterment destroyed her sensitive and guilt-ridden husband.
A great and tragic love story."
This post has been edited by jorjieli on 1 Mar 2006, 02:01