page_title: Elizabeth Siddal
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Elizabeth Siddal / Work
context_page_description: Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, styled and commonly known as "Lizzie", was an English artist, poet, and artists' model. Siddall was an important and influential artist and poet. Significant collections of her artworks can be found at Wightwick Manor and the Ashmolean. Siddall was painted and drawn extensively by artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Walter Deverell, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
context_section_description: In 1852, Siddall began to study with Rossetti. She also painted a self-portrait, which differs from the idealised beauty portrayed by the Pre-Raphaelites. In 1855, art critic John Ruskin began to subsidise her career and paid £150 per year in exchange for all the drawings and paintings she produced. She produced many sketches, drawings, and watercolours as well as one oil painting. Her sketches are laid out in a fashion similar to Pre-Raphaelite compositions illustrating Arthurian legend and other idealized medieval themes, and she exhibited with the Pre-Raphaelites at the summer exhibition at Russell Place in 1857.
  During this period Siddall also began to write poetry, often with dark themes about lost love or the impossibility of true love. "Her verses were as simple and moving as ancient ballads; her drawings were as genuine in their medieval spirit as much more highly finished and competent works of Pre-Raphaelite art," wrote critic William Gaunt. Both Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown supported and admired her work.
  A 2018 exhibition, entitled "Beyond Ophelia" and curated by National Trust Assistant Curator Hannah Squire, ran at Wightwick Manor and featured 12 artworks created by Siddall and owned by the National Trust. Only the second solo exhibition of her work (the first was curated by Dr. Jan Marsh at the Ruskin Gallery, Sheffield in 1991), the exhibition examined Siddall's career, artistic style, subject matter, and the prejudice she faced as a female artist, whilst also examining the Manders of Wightwick as pioneering collectors: Rosalie Glynn Grylls and Geoffrey Mander paid a record sum for her work in the 1960s and gave it to the National Trust.
caption: Elizabeth Siddall, Lovers Listening to Music, 1854. Pen and brown ink over pencil on paper, 23.9 x 29.8 cm. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. A version of this is also in Wightwick Manor's collection.
exif: {}