William Morris and Red House

A number of sources give good summaries of the life of Lizzie Siddal. See below for:

Wikipedia - Elizabeth Siddal

The present extract is taken, with thanks, from Jan Marsh, The Pre-Raphaelites ( p28-29), 1998, NPG

Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, model, muse and Pre-Raphaelite artist in her own right, was working as a milliner when first introduced to the young painters. Soon known familiarly as 'Miss Sid', or 'the Sid', and then as Lizzie, she sat to Hunt, and to Millais for the drowning Ophelia. It was a trying experience, according to Arthur Huges:

...she had to lie in a large bath filled with water, which was kept at an even temperature by lamps placed beneath. One day, just as the picture was nearly finished, the lamps went out unnoticed by the artist, who was so intensely absorbed in his work that he thought of nothing else, and the poor lady was kept floating in the cold water till she was quite benumbed.

(J.G. Millais, John Everet Millais, 1899)

'She was tall and slender, with red coppery hair and bright consumptive complexion', added Huges, recalling also:

She was exceedingly quiet, speaking very little. She read Tennyson, having first come to know something about him by finding one or two of his poems on a piece of paper which she brought home to her mother wrapping a pat of butter...Her drawings were very beautiful, but without force.

(FromThe Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, 1897)

Rossetti drew and painted Lizzie over and over again. Sitting, standing, lying, reading and sleeping. 'One face looks out from all his canvases', wrote Christina Rossetti. 'A queen in opal or in ruby dress. A nameless girl freshest in summer greens. A saint, and angel...'.

In 1857 she exhibited at the Pre-Raphaelite show in Russell Place, and then settled for a while in Derbyshire. When in 1860 she finally married Rossetti, she was addicted to laudanum; a stillborn daughter led to depression and then to a fatal drug overdose. She left intense, mediaeval water-colours and some fragments of verse:

To touch the glove upon her tender hand,

To watch the jewel sparkle in her ring,

Lifted my heart into sudden song

As when the wild birds sing...

I watch the shadows gather round my heart,

I live to know that she is gone -

Gone for ever, like the tender dove

That left the Ark alone

'Gone'