In
John Everett Millais's “Ophelia” she lies amidst the grassy water plants, “her
clothes spread wide and mermaid-like.”
But it is with Gabriel Dante Rossetti that Siddal's name is forever
entwined.
Walter
Deverall, honorary artist of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, discovered
Elizabeth Siddal in a milliner’s shop in Cranbourne Alley, Leicester Square.
Pausing to browse the window of the hat shop whilst shopping with his mother,
Deverall noticed the striking looks of the assistant within. He courted her,
but once she had met Rossetti she only had eyes for him. Rossetti probably met
her in late 1849 when she posed for Deverall’s “Twelfth Night” and was
introduced to the tri-founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From the
winter of 1851-2 she mostly modelled for Rossetti. Elizabeth's sensual full
lips, heavy lidded eyes and above all, her waist length auburn hair, soon
placed her much in demand as a model. But the intense demands placed on her by
the Pre-Raphaelite artists nearly killed her. It was in 1852, while Millais
composed and painted the famed portrait of “Ophelia” in his converted greenhouse
studio, that Elizabeth Siddal lay day after day in a bath of tepid water,
heated merely by candles beneath. She contracted pneumonia as a consequence.
None of the three young men found her more alluring than the poet and painter,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The attraction proved mutual and she became his lover.
Having lived as man and wife for a number of years they eventually married in
1860, but their union was not a happy one. Elizabeth Siddal's continuing ill
health, and Rossetti's predilection for sexual experimentation outside of their
relationship, compounded the short-comings and within a short time their
marriage had begun to flounder. After two years of increasing marital stress,
Rossetti arrived home one day to discover his wife dying. Elizabeth had taken a
draft of laudanum, but had misjudged the strength of the tincture and fatally
poisoned herself with an overdose on 11 February 1862. As she lay in her open
coffin in the sitting room of their house in Highgate Village, the pallid complexion
of death highlighting her golden tresses, Rossetti placed a manuscript
parchment of love poems against her cheek. Elizabeth took these words to her
grave.
Seven years later, Rossetti's
artistic and literary reputation had begun to diminish, due in no small part to
his increasing addiction to whisky and chloral, a hypnotic sedative. Charles
Augustus Howell, Rossetti's literary agent, in an attempt to bring his client
back to public attention, suggested to Rossetti that the love poems which lay
with his long dead wife demanded a wider audience and, as no copy existed, the
originals should be retrieved from Elizabeth's grave in Highgate Cemetery.
Though Rossetti initially resisted, Howell was persuasive, and, with an
Exhumation Order signed, the Rossetti family tomb in the western section of the
graveyard resounded to the sound of shovels once more. To ensure that no member
of the public witnessed the scene the grave was opened under the canopy of
night. A large adjacent bonfire lit the scene and, as the bell of nearby St
Michael's Church chimed midnight, Elizabeth's heavy lead coffin was hauled to
the surface. Rossetti, unable to face the ghoulish deed had stayed at home, but
those who were present gasped as the last screw was removed from the lid and it
was lifted.
Elizabeth Siddal looked as though still alive. Her features were perfectly
preserved, and she seemed as if in a deep slumbered for the seven years since
her interment. Her hair had changed; even though the famed auburn locks that grace
so many Pre-Raphaelite portraits had lost none of their vibrant colour. Her
hair, waist-length in life, had continued to grow after death and in the
flickering light from the bonfire, seemed now to fill the coffin. The love
poems were carefully taken from her. After the casket was re-buried, they were
disinfected and dried by a doctor before being transported to Rossetti.
Published in 1870 as simply “Poems,” they were not the literary success
expected, and the whole episode haunted the artist for the remainder of his
life. He died in 1882 but was refused burial at Highgate Cemetery where
Elizabeth reposed. Rossetti was interred at Burchington Churchyard, Kent.