Siddal, Elizabeth Eleanor (British, 1829-1862)

Born in London in 1829, daughter of a cutler and small businessman from Sheffield. No details of her education are recorded but by the age of 20 Siddal was working as a milliner and dressmaker. She was introduced to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as a model, sitting to Walter Deverell, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. From 1852 she studied informally with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who encouraged an earnest, naive style. In 1855 she secured patronage from John Ruskin, on whose allowance she visited Paris and Nice for the sake of her health. Her exhibition debut was at the Pre-Raphaelite salon at Russell Place in the summer of 1857, with drawings on literary subjects and a self-portrait in oils; the watercolour Clerk Saunders was also included in the British Art show that toured the USA. In 1857-8 Siddal visited Sheffield, where she made use of the art school facilities, and Matlock in Derbyshire. In May 1860, at a time of sickness, she married Rossetti and settled with him in London where she continued working, on romantic-medieval watercolours, assisting also with the decoration of William Morris's Red House and planning to collaborate on illustrations with Georgiana Burne-Jones. A stillborn daughter in 1861 was followed by post-natal depression and death from a laudanum overdose in February 1862. Later, Rossetti re-collected her works and photographed her drawings and sketches, from which her ideas and output can be reconstructed. Subsequently her reputation as an artist was wholly obscured by that as model, tragic muse, mistress and shrew, a process whose reversal began in 1984 with Siddal's token inclusion in the Tate Gallery show, and continued with the 1991 retrospective view of her work at the Ruskin Gallery, Sheffield