At Least There Were Candles

John Everett Millais painting "Ophelia'
At this period Rossetti fell in love with the woman who was later to become his wife, Elizabeth Siddal. In the spring of 1850, shopping with his mother, Walter Deverell had seen this beautiful shop assistant at a milliner's in Cranbourn Street. She … became a favorite model of all the Brotherhood, appearing, for instance, in Hunt's Valentine Rescuing Sylvia and — having posed in the most uncomfortable circumstances, for hours in a tepid bath — as Millais's Ophelia. The Pre-Raphaelites called her "Guggums'. So did Rossetti, but he adored her too.
Timothy Hilton, The Pre-Raphaelites
The dress with the tarnished embroidery was put on, the folds billowed out most realistically, and Millais became engrossed in the sparkling effect. At first the water was warm … and slowly got cold. Millais painted on with his usual intensity. His model never complained, but she caught a severe chill. Later her angry father threatened to claim damages. Millais hastened to pay the doctor's bill; and Elizabeth recovered.
Masters of British Nineteenth-Century Art
[Millais] began to paint little girls asleep in sermons, society ladies, popular historical subjects like The Boyhood of Raleigh, weak pastiches of Reynolds. England had lost, at the age of twenty-eight, the most talented painter, apart from Turner, that she had ever produced.
Timothy Hilton, The Pre-Raphaelites
This passivity helped to bring them together. She trailed slowly towards him, a melancholy doll, set in sluggish motion by the virile, expansive gestures of the warm Latin. His roar of laughter elicited from her a wan smile, his jests provoked a faint answering shade of humour, his ardour the ghost of passion. In the same contrary fashion he loved her because she was so little responsive. No one knew what she was thinking of or if she thought at all… He breathed genius into her. Under his influence she began to paint little pictures and write little poems.
William Gaunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy
Lizzy apart from Gabriel was often physically more vigorous than with him… Dr. Acland may well have been right when he suggested that her lungs were not nearly as disabled as her ability to cope with her exterior problems, but his prescription … would reinforce the ailment. To suggest, for example, that Lizzy should scrupulously refrain from drawing would truly have eliminated the strain of her attempting to rise to Rossetti's, and then Ruskin's, romantic expectations.
Stanley Weintraub, Four Rossettis
Bye the bye, there is one of Rossetti's pupils — a poor girl — dying I am afraid — of ineffable genius — to whom some day or other a commission may be encouragement and sympathy be charity — but there is no hurry as she don't work well enough yet and Rossetti and I will take care of her till she does, if she lives.
John Ruskin, letter to Ellen Heaton, c. 1855
Gabriel and Lizzie married on the 23th May, 1860… Lizzie was in desperately bad health at the time… At the beginning of May of the following year Lizzie was delivered of a dead baby. The child — a girl — had been dead for a fortnight before the event, which left her weak and in a state of great despondency. When the Burne-Joneses called on her after her recovery, they found her rocking the empty cradle… In February 1862, Lizzie Rossetti died of an overdose of laudanum.
Helen Rossetti Angeli, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Elizabeth Siddal and Rosa Brett are still invisible Pre-Raphaelites.
Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Victorian Women Artists
She wrote herself off the map, out of the play,
drifting downstream, upstaging, for one brief scene, its hero.
The painter imagines her in a burnished dress, embossed
with flowers from a garland. The river supports her,
nature canopies her from the banks, itself fully clothed.
By a stream in Surrey, he spends weeks filling in,
around her sketched presence, reeds, moss, willow…
He is a microscope, an alembic. Later, scholars
will debate how closely the foliage follows the text.
She floats in his mind, in the stream, half-created.
At his studio, the model arrives: grave, fresh-faced,
impeccably delicate. In the vestibule, she is slow
to part with hat, top-coat, even her brolly…
At last, she stands before him wearing only a dress;
it reaches to her neck, curtains small feet.
To work. He towers above the easel, seeming not to move.
She lies in a tepid bath, its base circled by candles.
Her mouth is opened as if beyond all appetite for air;
her hands curve up, ritually poised, waiting…
What are her eyes thinking? They shine, hypnotised
by their own light. He paints an expression that cannot
interpret itself, be interpreted.
Millais is twenty-two.
He will become, in one year, an Associate of the Royal Academy;
within three, the husband of Swinburne's wife; within five,
the creator of his last great paintings. For the next forty,
he will be a past master of the art of respectability.
The model is twenty. In ten years she will die — indirectly,
of consumption and thirteen years of Dante Gabriel Rossetti;
directly, of laudanum: too much of it.
Elizabeth Siddal,
those long hours in cooling baths cannot have helped.
At least there were candles.