Elizabeth Siddal

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.