![]() (The manuscript, Rossetti said, was “soaked through and through… a dreadful smell – partly no doubt the disinfectants”.)įor modern readers, accustomed to the legend of Siddal as the “meek, unconscious dove” (as Rossetti called her, after Tennyson), it is a jolt to find that this much-fed-upon face could actually talk back – and that, behind the “sweet lips” so fetishised by Rossetti, were pointed teeth. “This is her picture as she was,” he writes firmly in the first line of “The Portrait”, one of the poems he tucked into Siddal’s coffin, under her hair, after her death from an overdose of laudanum in 1862, aged 32 then scandalously exhumed seven years later for publication. ![]() Rossetti, unsurprisingly, didn’t see it that way. The girl in his paintings is “Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim / Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright / Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.” In Christina’s sonnet, that reverence becomes vampiric: “He feeds upon her face by day and night.” Yet the artist sees only what he wants. A year earlier, Ford Madox Brown had come to see Rossetti at his studio, where “he showed me a drawer full of ‘Guggums’ God knows how many… it is like a monomania with him”. ![]() ![]() “One face looks out from all his canvases,” wrote Christina Rossetti in her 1856 sonnet “In the Artist’s Studio”, around the time her brother Dante Gabriel was obsessively drawing Elizabeth Siddal, or “Guggum”, as he called her. ![]()
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