THE PRE-RAPHAELITES (1848-1901)

 

The Ballad Of Lizzie Siddall

Dante Rossetti killed poor Lizzie Siddall,

But not with his hand or a gun or a knife.
No, he painted her and he promised her
And he betrayed her right out of her young life.

As he shortened her name by an ‘l’ to Siddal,

So he would shorten her cursed young life.
Her time with him was a heaven and a hell -
She was dead soon after he took her to wife.

 

Now, Elizabeth was born in London Town,
But she was raised down in society quite low.
She may just have been an unschooled shop-girl,
But she wrote and drew and her beauty seemed to glow.

Lizzie fell in with the Pre-Raphaelites,

Modelling for them while writing her own rhymes.
Dante Rossetti, he fell in love with Lizzie
And drew and painted her a thousand times.

She became one of The Brotherhood’s ‘stunners’,

Though she painted too and John Ruskin was her patron;
Along with Jane and Fanny, Annie and Alexa,
She was their mistress, their murderess, their maiden.

 

The PRB loved their flowing hair and pouting lips
And were mad for soulful Lizzie’s flaming red tresses
And they painted them into their classical scenes
Of damsels in distress, heroines and goddessses.

Everett Millais made Lizzie his Ophelia

And hour after hour, she shivered in his bath
Which passed for a cold, flower-strewn river,
Until poor Lizzie, she all but caught her death.

And Dante Rossetti made her his Beatrix

In the house where they lived in mortal sin
And although he loved her, he would leave her
For the arms of other ‘stunners’, time and again.

Lately stricken by a fit of guilty conscience,

Did Dante Rossetti at last Lizzie wed,
But only in a lowly hole in the corner way
After she had been ten long years in his bed.

Then Lizzie sickened, her babe was stillborn,

Yet the flames burned as old in her fiery mane,
But Dante Rossetti turned to his new muse -
Another man’s wife, the raven-haired Jane.

 

And the world saw this other ‘stunner’s face
Gazing out from all his blazing pictures
And poor Lizzie, left to her own devices,
Became addicted to deadly mixtures.

 

One poisonous potion did Lizzie drink,
Her pale withering looks to recover
And another for to dull the heart broken
By the husband no longer her lover.

He buried Lizzie in Highgate, London,

Along with his poems in a journal;
Killed by heartbreak and arsenic and laudanum,
She sank while he prayed for her rest eternal.

In a passion of fine romantic grief,
He placed his book of poems under her heavy head,
Swearing that it would die with the babe inside her,
As she was lowered down to her death bed.

 

Dante Rossetti, like his Lizzie, took to drugs.
When his resurrected poems were decried,
He overdosed on whiskey and laudanum,
But unlike Lizzie, he survived his suicide.

Then some time later, Dante Rossetti

Decided his oh so precious journal to save,
So back to Highgate for the coffin he went,
And raised up poor Lizzie where she lay in the grave.

When they opened up the coffin in wonder,

They looked down upon the cold Elizabeth
With her hair still red and grown longer still -
Almost as lovely in life did she prove in death.

Well, famed Dante Rossetti published his poems

And dallied for years with the sable-haired Jane
And Sarah - another low-born ‘stunner’ like Lizzie -
But for all his glory, grief found him out again.

He was losing his hair and too much of his sleep,

And now he took to chloral nitrate and whiskey.
When at last he died, he was not an old man,
But he was not nearly so young as poor Lizzie.

Yes, Dante Rossetti killed poor Lizzie Siddall,

But not with his hand or a gun or a knife.
No, he painted her and he promised her

And he betrayed her right out of her young life.

(2015)

I couldn't decide on a particular artist to write about, but then it came to me that the tragic story of Elizabeth Siddall might work as the sort of gothic ballad that so inspired the painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (who, at the outset of their movement, signed their paintings 'PRB'). There was the odd Pre-Raphelite picture after the Victorian period, although it is generally seen as a Victorian art movement - hence the dates 1848 (when William Holman Hunt's 'The Eve Of Saint Agnes' was first exhibited) and 1901 (the end of the Victorian era). 

The picture above is Gabriel Dante Rossetti's 'Beata Beatrix' with Siddall as his poet namesake's doomed heroine Beatrix. Lizzie was doomed too - as symbolised by the bird of ill omen dropping a poppy into her hands (opium being a key ingredient of laudanum, one of the drugs that killed her).