The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal by Jan Marsh

We know a little more about Annie Miller, a young barmaid asked by William Holman Hunt in 1853 to sit for his major picture The Awakening Conscience. ‘To date, none of Eaton’s own words or thoughts are known,’ Marsh writes, although her features can be traced from one picture to the next. One of the most intriguing figures is Fanny Eaton, a black model who, as Marsh points out in the book accompanying the exhibition, has been ‘hiding in plain sight’ in paintings by Joanna Boyce Wells (another ‘sister’ represented here), Albert Moore and Simeon Solomon, who asked her to serve as a model for both African and Middle Eastern figures. Of the twelve women explored, each in a discrete section, some remain elusive.

It unfolds a fascinating series of interconnected life stories. It is, in effect, a cultural history of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in its focus on how clients were tended, studios managed, costumes stitched, parallel careers pursued, opportunities for work seized and respectability either sought or rejected. It pays attention to models such as Fanny Cornforth and Annie Miller, investigates the activities of the wives of some of its leading figures, including Jane Morris, Georgiana Burne-Jones and Effie Gray Millais, and celebrates the art of such sculptors and painters as Maria Zambaco and Marie Spartali Stillman. ‘Pre-Raphaelite Sisters’ takes the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, fades out the central figures and asks those previously known for their supporting or peripheral roles to step forward. But the first, more often told tale has undoubtedly cast Siddal in too passive a role by focusing solely on her significance as a model and muse. Well, I wasn’t there either, but it would hardly be surprising if both accounts had been shaped by omissions and embellishments while containing some elements of truth. An alternative story, apparently recounted by Siddal herself, is that she met Deverell through his father, then assistant secretary of the Government School of Design in London, to whom she had shown some of her drawings.

According to Jan Marsh, the co-curator of ‘Pre-Raphaelite Sisters’ at the National Portrait Gallery, this account of Siddal’s ‘discovery’, a key piece of Pre-Raphaelite lore, is a picturesque fiction, created long after the event by people who weren’t there at the time.

Struck by her beauty, he persuaded his mother – the reason he was there in the first place – to ask this tall, pale young woman if she would model for him, and… but wait. I n 1850 Elizabeth Siddal was stitching bonnets in a back room of Mrs Tozer’s millinery in Cranbourne Alley, near Leicester Square, when she was glimpsed through an open door by the young artist Walter Deverell.

The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal by Jan Marsh