Elizabeth Siddal

Elizabeth Siddal was the model for the most famous drowned woman in British painting, was an artist in her own right, and was buried with the only manuscript of her husband's poems, which he later dug up. She was a cutler's daughter working in a milliner's shop when Walter Deverell found her, and she sat for Millais's Ophelia in 1852 in a bath kept warm by lamps beneath it; the lamps went out, Millais did not notice, and she caught a severe illness her father sued him over. She then sat almost exclusively for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who drew her obsessively. She was also drawing and painting herself - Ruskin gave her an allowance of a hundred and fifty pounds a year in exchange for her output, and she exhibited alongside the Pre-Raphaelites in 1857, the only woman to do so. Her work is small, awkward and genuinely strange. She and Rossetti married after ten years, she bore a stillborn daughter in 1861, and she died the following year of a laudanum overdose that may have been suicide; the note, if there was one, was destroyed. Rossetti buried his poems in her coffin and had them exhumed seven years later to publish. Ruskin found her work genuinely original and said so in print, which was more than he said of most of the men. Her drawings are in the Ashmolean and the Tate; the poems she left are bleak and were published long after her death. Rossetti painted Beata Beatrix from memory of her face after she died. The exhumation at Highgate in 1869, arranged through his agent Charles Augustus Howell while Rossetti stayed away, was done at night by lamplight, and the manuscript was disinfected and published the next year to considerable success and lasting distaste.

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