One of the saddest stories of the last century was the story of Rossetti's unhappy wife, married in the old church of St Clement's at Hasting's.

The Tragic Story of Rossetti's Beatrice ONE of the most striking pictures of last century was Rossetti's Beata Beatrix, named after the beautiful woman Dante loved. It is a portrait, painted from memory, of one who had been the artist's wife for two short years and whose tragic passing cast a cloud over this radiant genius, preventing him from attaining that height as poet and artist to which he seemed inevitably destined.

This unhappy woman was Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal. She was of rare beauty, and for years a source of inspiration to the little band of artists known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her association with these artists began in 1850, when Walter Deverell walked with his mother into a bonnet shop in Cranbourne Alley. Here, among the assistants he saw a beautiful girl of 17, dignified and modest, tall and graceful, with a brilliant complexion and hair like red gold.

Walter Deverell was at that time working on his painting of Twelfth Night, and in Elizabeth Siddal he saw his Viola. His mother arranged for the beautiful girl to sit as his model, and Rossetti, who was sitting for the same picture as the Jester, met Elizabeth in Deverell's studio.

Her lovely face was the type artists idealised in the middle of the 19th century, and she appears in many a masterpiece, the saddest of all being the Ophelia by Millais.

Rossetti fell deeply in love with Elizabeth. He taught her to paint, so that she became more a pupil than a model. Her water colours have a graceful style and a true feeling for colour, while their subjects show genuine poetic feeling. It has been suggested that Rossetti's love for her loosened the ties which bound the Brotherhood; at any rate, the members saw less of each other after 1851.

 

Three years later John Ruskin began to take an interest in Rossetti, buying his water colours. It was generous and timely, for the artist was very poor. It was during these years that Rossetti wrote some of his most perfect poems. Some were to Elizabeth, and his Song of the Bower is a perfect love lyric. After a courtship lasting nearly ten years Rossetti married his beautiful pupil. They lived in a quaint house overlooking the Thames where Blackfriars Bridge stands. Their life was very Bohemian. Elizabeth was frail and consumptive. Rossetti's work and friendships took him much from home; these years were the busiest in his life and at the best of times he was unconventional, though he neither drank nor smoked nor gambled.

 

Probably Elizabeth felt she was neglected. So it was that the marriage ended in a terrible tragedy. Elizabeth's health grew worse, and her doctor prescribed doses of laudanum to relieve neuralgia. In February 1862 they both spent a happy evening with the poet Swinburne, and after seeing his wife home Rossetti hurried off to lecture at the Working Men's College.

 

On his return he found his wife dying from an overdose of laudanum. A coroner's jury decided that it was an accident, but many of Elizabeth's friends did not think so. Rossetti himself was demented with grief. Taking the little manuscript book in which he had written his poems, he placed it under Elizabeth's lovely hair in the coffin, and it was buried with her in Highgate Cemetery.

 

They had often been written while she was suffering and when he might have been consoling her. Rossetti went to live a lonely and eccentric life at Chelsea. Worldly success came, but it was too late to bring him real happiness. His best portraits were painted from his memory of her, and he began to regret that the poems she inspired were lost to himself and the world in the grave at Highgate.

 

His friends persuaded him to retrieve them, and after being buried seven years they were recovered from the grave and published. They have a magic beauty in word and music, and they remain also a pathetic fragment of the history of literature.

 

 

 

 

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