Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (25 July 1829 – 11 February 1862), better known as Elizabeth Siddal (a spelling she adopted in 1853), was an English artist, artists' model, and poet. Siddal was perhaps the most significant of the female models who posed for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Their ideas of female beauty were fundamentally influenced and personified by her. Walter Deverell and William Holman Hunt painted Siddal, and she was the model for John Everett Millais's famous painting Ophelia (1852). Early in her relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Siddal became his muse and exclusive model, and he portrayed her in almost all his early artwork depicting women.
Siddal became an artist in her own right and was the only woman to exhibit at an 1857 Pre-Raphaelite exhibition. Significant collections of her artworks can be found at Wightwick Manor and the Ashmolean. Sickly and melancholic during the last decade of her life, Siddal died of a laudanum overdose in 1862 during her second year of marriage to Rossetti.
Early life
Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, named after her mother, was born on 25 July 1829, at the family's home at 7Charles Street, Hatton Garden, at the time in the parish of Saffron Hill, Hatton Garden, Ely Rents and Ely Place in central London. Her parents were Charles Crooke Siddall, and Elizabeth Eleanor Evans, from a family of English and Welsh descent. She had two older siblings, Ann and Charles Robert. At the time of her birth, her father had a cutlery-making business.
About 1831, the Siddall family moved to the less affluent borough of Southwark, in south London. The remainder of the Siddall children were born in Southwark: Lydia, to whom she was particularly close; Mary, Clara, James and Henry. Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall "received an ordinary education, conformable to her condition in life" and first "read Tennyson ... by finding one or two poems of his on a piece of paper" that had been wrapped around some butter. Literary analysts have noted that her artwork sometimes used subjects from Tennyson's writings and that his writings may have influenced her poetry.
Pre-Raphaelite model
In 1849, while working at a millinery in Cranbourne Alley, London, Siddal made the acquaintance of Walter Deverell. Accounts differ on the circumstances of their meeting. One account is that she became acquainted with Deverell's father, who worked at the Government School of Design, then at Somerset House. Siddal showed some of her artwork to him, and he introduced her to his son. In another account, William Allingham visited the milliner's to meet a woman he was acquainted with and admired; Siddal was the woman's co-worker and joined the pair on their walk home, as it was the women's usual practice to travel home from work together. Siddal made such an impression on Allingham that he recommended her as a possible model to his friend Deverell, who was struggling with a large oil painting based on the Shakespeare play Twelfth Night.
A third account has Deverell accompanying his mother to the millinery where he noticed Siddal in the back of the shop. In any case, Deverell later described Siddal as "magnificently tall, with a lovely figure, and a face of the most delicate and finished modelling... she has grey eyes, and her hair is like dazzling copper, and shimmers with luster." Deverell subsequently employed Siddal as a model and introduced her to the Pre-Raphaelites.
As with the other Pre-Raphaelites, Deverell took his inspiration directly from life rather than from an idealized classical figure. In his Twelfth Night painting, he based Orsino on himself, Feste on his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Viola/Cesario on Siddal. This was the first time Siddal sat as a model. According to William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel's brother, "Deverell drew another Viola from her, in an etching for The Germ." Elaine Shefer asserts that Deverell portrayed Siddal in A Pet and The Grey Parrot.
William Holman Hunt painted her in A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids (1849–1850) and Two Gentlemen of Verona, Valentine Rescuing Sylvia From Proteus (1850 or 1851).
For John Everett Millais's Ophelia, Siddal floated in a bathtub full of water to portray the drowning Ophelia. Millais painted daily through the winter, putting oil lamps under the tub to warm the water. On one occasion, the lamps went out and the water became icy cold. Millais, absorbed by his painting, did not notice and Siddal did not complain. After this, she became ill with a severe cold or pneumonia. Her father held Millais responsible and, under the threat of legal action, Millais paid her doctor's bills.