lizzie siddal the tragedy of a pre raphaelite supermodel

So iconic is the pose that the image has been imitated many times. Perhaps the most striking part is the desolate expression on her face and her outstretched hands almost in supplication.

The painting by Millais captures the natural setting and the shape of Ophelia’s dress spread out just underneath the surface of the water before it starts to sink and drag her down (Fig 1). Her clothes spread wide Īnd, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:īut the unfortunate Ophelia soon sank and drowned. After very poetically taking leave of her senses, Ophelia decks herself in “fantastic garlands” of wild flowers, wanders out of the castle to a nearby stream singing to herself, and as Gertrude describes it in the play:įell in the weeping brook.

In Hamlet, the sensitive and fragile Ophelia is driven mad by grief after her lover Hamlet rejects her and kills her father Polonius. It is difficult to think of Ophelia, one of Shakespeare’s most famous characters, without bringing to mind the famous depiction of her by John Everett Millais. 1 Ophelia, Sir John Everett Millais 1851-2, Tate Britain, London Modelling was not a respectable profession in the 1850s, but Lizzie Siddal was neither a guttersnipe nor a loose-living demi-mondaine.A picture of ill-health: the illness of Elizabeth Siddal April 19, 2019įig. The most macabre episode of her short, sad story happened posthumously, when Rossetti, having impetuously buried the only copy of his poems in her coffin, decided that he would after all rather like to publish them and was persuaded to dig them up. Many of Rossetti's most famous paintings of her - in particular Beata Beatrix, showing Dante's Beatrice at the moment of death - are similarly doom-laden. Stoically uncomplaining as the bath water grew chilly and Millais painted on, Lizzie was quite wrongly rumoured to have died of consumption as a result. She is best known as the model for Millais's dead Ophelia, shown on the cover of Lucinda Hawksley's new book. The intense, often moribund Pre-Raphaelite portraits of her suggest tragedy and it is as a tragic figure that she has most often been seen. In a competition to find the most inappropriate nickname ever bestowed, 'Guggum', Dante Gabriel Rossetti's vet name for Elizabeth Siddal, might take the prize.

Lizzie siddal the tragedy of a pre raphaelite supermodel