Born: 25 July 1829, United Kingdom
Died: 11 February 1862
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Elizabeth Rossetti, Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
If Elizabeth Siddall looks familiar, it’s because there are estimated to be thousands of images of her, many by her husband Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who also wrote poems inspired by her. She is the model for some of the most famous Pre-Raphaelite paintings hanging in museums, such as John Everett Millais’s Ophelia. But she was also a poet and artist who produced more than 100 watercolours, sketches, and drawings, as well as one oil painting, with art critic John Ruskin purchasing much of her output. Although her work has become more appreciated in the twenty-first century, at the time it was derided as a “pale imitation” of her husband’s—in a seemingly contradictory situation, some even claimed he was the true artist, which would seem to imply they were comparable in quality. Modern curators note the clear influence Siddall’s work had on her husband’s, when contemporaneous pieces are placed side-by-side.