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  • Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal

Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal

1829–1862

Sir Patrick Spens 1856
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Biography

Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (25 July 1829 – 11 February 1862), better known as Elizabeth Siddal (a spelling she adopted in 1853), was an English artist, art 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.

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Pre-Raphaelite

Artworks

  • Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal Lady Affixing Pennant to a Knight’s Spear

    c.1856
  • Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal Sir Patrick Spens

    1856

Artist as subject

Left Right
  • Sir Max Beerbohm Rossetti’s Courtship

    1916
  • Sir Max Beerbohm Miss Cornforth: ‘Oh, very pleased to meet Mr Ruskin, I’m sure’

    1916
  • Sir Max Beerbohm Spring Cottage, Hampstead, 1860

    1917
  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti Beata Beatrix

    c.1864–70
  • Sir John Everett Millais, Bt Ophelia

    1851–2
    On display at Tate Britain part of Historic and Modern British Art
  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti The Tune of the Seven Towers

    1857
  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti The Passover in the Holy Family

    1856
  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti Dantis Amor

    1860
  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti St Catherine

    1857
  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti Elizabeth Siddal in a Chair. Verso: Elizabeth Siddal in a Chair

    c.1853
  • Dante Gabriel Rossetti St George and Princess Sabra

    1862

Film and audio

  • Look Closer

    The Real Ophelia

Features

  • Look Closer

    The Story of Ophelia

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