Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, better known as Elizabeth Siddal, was an English artist, art model, and poet. Siddal was perhaps the most significant of the female models who posed for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Their ideas of female beauty were fundamentally influenced and personified by her. Walter Deverell and William Holman Hunt painted Siddal, and she was the model for John Everett Millais's famous painting Ophelia (1852). Early in her relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Siddal became his muse and exclusive model, and he portrayed her in almost all his early artwork depicting women.
Siddal, c. 1860
Walter Deverell, Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene IV, 1850
John Everett Millais, Ophelia (1851–52)
Elizabeth Siddal, self-portrait, 1854
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner who formed a seven-member "Brotherhood" partly modelled on the Nazarene movement. The Brotherhood was only ever a loose association and their principles were shared by other artists of the time, including Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes and Marie Spartali Stillman. Later followers of the principles of the Brotherhood included Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and John William Waterhouse.
Proserpine, 1874, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with Jane Morris as model
Illustration by Holman Hunt of Thomas Woolner's poem "My Beautiful Lady", published in The Germ, 1850
Christ in the House of His Parents, by John Everett Millais, 1850
Ophelia, by John Everett Millais, 1851–52