The Models of the Pre-RaphaeliteBrotherhood: Treated as Materials or Mythos?

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was a small group of young male artists at the end of the nineteenth century in England. They believed that art coming out of the Royal Academy was becoming too systematic and mechanical, so they wanted to make more emotive art that emulated work from before the Italian Renaissance artist, Raphael. They were also interested in the community aspect of Medieval artist guilds. They rejected the industrialization of London, painting scenes from the Bible or medieval lore with the help of female models, which they called “stunners.”

The Royal Academy in London was established in 1768; however, by the mid-nineteenth century the subject matter and style of the paintings were monotonous because the artists were all products of the Academy’s own school of instruction. An example of this art is William Dyce’s The Madonna and Child (1845) (Figure 1), which portrays Mary holding baby Jesus in a field. She stands in profile while the baby is in three-quarter view, and they are both turned to read the Bible that Mary is holding. There are some trees and mountains in the background, but Mary and Jesus are much bigger as they are in the immediate foreground of the work. The brightest color used is the red of Mary’s dress and the Bible while the other colors in the painting are muted. It is a very balanced painting, with a focus on clarity of light and line but without much detail. Mary is nondescript and common, like she was painted from Dyce’s memory of other paintings of the Virgin.

In contrast, the Brotherhood wanted to dismantle the norm that the Academy had set. An example of the Brotherhood’s interests is evident in Millais’ Ophelia (1852) (Figure 2). The painting depicts the scene in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet where Ophelia has been driven mad and drowns herself in a river, with her wedding/funeral bouquet floating in the water around her. Millais chose Shakespeare because he was one of what the Brotherhood called the ‘immortals,’ who were people or legends that the PRB thought inspired beautiful paintings and offered inspiration that stemmed from their work. Ophelia was the painting that made model Lizzie Siddal famous, but it was also the painting that made her chronically ill for the rest of her life. She got sick because Millais’s mother had set up lights under the tub that Lizzie laid in to keep the water warm, but the lamps went out during the end of the painting session, causing Lizzie to lay in the cold water for hours and develop the sickness that she could never rid herself of. Ophelia was exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy in 1852 and was renowned for its work with realism, specifically the flowers in the background. One art critic from Punch, a British weekly magazine, who saw the painting at the Royal Academy’s exhibition explained how most viewers were commenting on the nature over the model, “Talk as you like…about the needless elaboration of those water mosses, and the over making-out of the rose-leaves, and the abominable finish of those river-side weeds matted with gossamer, which the field botanist may identify leaf by leaf. I tell you, I am aware of none of these. I see only that face of poor drowning Ophelia. My eye goes to that, and rests on that, and sees nothing else.” He was captivated by Lizzie and the dark water that she laid in, which provided a great contrast to her pale and cold skin. Most of the art critics who saw the work were fascinated by the flowers and other surrounding nature that are all painted with vivid color, furthering the “newly dead” look that Millais aimed to achieve. 

This paper examines five prominent female models of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, Annie Miller, Jane Morris, and Georgiana Burne-Jones. Each of these women have the same general background: they were all born into a lower class or even an impoverished family situation and worked elsewhere before they were “discovered” by the Brotherhood and began modeling. This background led many of the artists to see themselves as higher than the women, not only on the basis of sex but also class, education, and value. I argue that by modeling for the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Siddal, Cornforth, Miller, Morris and Burne-Jones were not only exposed to the sexism of the time, but also became abstract objectifications of the Pre-Raphaelite artists. As evidenced by letters, writings, and their artworks, the artists viewed the models as pieces of art, perfectly beautiful things that they could become obsessed with and later mistake the obsession for love. This resulted in emotional manipulation by the men, telling the women they loved them when they were more so obsessed with how the women affected their art. I have centered my work around how some of the women models were treated and how their lives were shaped by the men.

The Pre-Raphaelites thought that art at the Academy was being taught in a manner that left, according to scholar Lucinda Hawksley, “no room for individual expression or original ideas.” They wanted to use rich and exciting colors and to experiment with their paint to create new art that deviated from the formulaic work that was being pumped out of the Royal Academy. To do so, they went back to pre-Renaissance times when ideas and art were creating robust changes in the world. They also believed that emotion should be embedded in their art, one of the reasons as to why they fell in love with their models. They worked with paint as well as emotions to get such beautiful art. 

London itself was not a beautiful place at the end of the Industrial Revolution. For about a century there had been so many new inventions and technology that the city could not keep up. An example of this is the Great Stink of 1858, where the Thames River, a historical dumping ground for the city’s waste, had a stench so bad that the smell, usually contained to the river itself, spread all over London. It was events like this along with debilitating poverty, thick smog, and the decidedly not beautiful factories that also affected the Brotherhood’s anti-industrial stance. They wanted to go back to a time when goods were handmade and buildings were as beautiful as they were functional. They wanted better air quality and less trash and sewage overflow on the streets. These events influenced their ideas on gender and labor too. They also believed that human morals were ruined as beautiful women were doing degrading or laborious work; they found some of their models working in factories or on the streets. 

Dante Rossetti, the leader of the group, sought a particular type of beauty in a model to fulfill the PRB’s ideals. He used the word “stunner” to describe a woman that the Brotherhood thought was beautiful and wanted to have as a model. Stunners were usually not very conventionally beautiful. A few had red hair which was thought to be devious at the time and others stood out for their sharp and severe facial features. Jane Morris was one of the most striking models that the PRB had. In one article Morris is described by the author, Mancoff, as such, “the chiseled planes of her face and her dark slate-gray eyes, ringed by thick lashes and defined by thick brows, gave her a brooding demeanor.” Their features stood out on canvas, jarring viewers, and that is what the men were looking for. Through the choice of their models, they pushed back against the idea of the Academy that art must be uniform to be considered good. To further this point, in the same article as before, Mancoff mentions the phenomenon that Jane Morris became, saying: 

Without seeking publicity or celebrity, she became a living icon. Well into the twentieth century, ‘seeing Mrs. Morris’ was regarded as an essential aesthetic experience among experienced art circles…Richard Le Gallienne, in his own memoir, confessed that when he visited the Morris home to pay his respects after the great man’s death, ‘the temptation to look upon the face…whose strange loveliness dreams out at us from the paintings of Rossetti…was too great to be resisted.’ 

Even at her husband’s wake, people were focused on her and the presence that she commanded in spite of her naturally withdrawn and quiet personality. Overall, she was viewed more as a piece of art than a person, which was common with these models. Despite having serious and long artistic and romantic relationships with many of the women, the men also had affairs, halted some of the women’s artistic careers, and ruined some of their reputations all because of this “love” that they claimed. For example, Georgie Burne-Jones was engaged to Edward Burne-Jones in 1856 and then waited four years before getting married in 1860. Georgie had made art her whole life but her family never had enough money to consistently pay for a teacher. Her marriage to an artist should have granted her ample access to art teachers and lessons and it did for a while. Edward arranged for her to have lessons with Ford Madox Brown when they were engaged and she helped decorate the Morris’ infamous Red House. The Bridge of Sighs (Figure 3) (1858), one of the only existing works by  Georgie, is a visual depiction of the Thomas Moore’s poem of the same name, in which a homeless young woman commits suicide by jumping off the Waterloo Bridge in London. Throughout this painting, Madox Brown’s industrial influence is apparent and we can see that Georgie would have been a great artist because of her ability to set the scene and capture the emotions of everyone in the painting. This chaotic and tragic moment is captured on the distressed and melancholic faces of the people who were present during the woman’s suicide. But as Georgie further settled into the role of wife and then mother, her artistic career was ignored. It was treated as a hobby by her husband and all of their friends—a hobby that she no longer had time for, as she was taking care of Edward and his nervous disorder as well as their children and the household. In her Memorials, she describes the feeling of exile that was brought about by her children:

The difference in our life made by the presence of a child was very great, for I had been used to be much with Edward- reading aloud to him while he worked, and in many ways sharing the life of the studio- and I remember the feeling of exile with which I now heard through its closed door the well known voices of friends together with Edward’s laugh, while I sat with my little son on my knee and dropped selfish tears upon him as, ‘the separator of companions and the terminator of delights’ 

She felt locked away with the baby, unable to work on her art or see her friends due to her newfound motherhood.

Through examples like these and those that follow, I show how the models were treated both as deities and as vehicles for the art. Georgie Burne-Jones once said that she “was a holy thing to them [the PRB]” but at the same time the women were treated as another material for creating art, like a brush or paint. The culmination of both these ideas resulted in the men leading the women on. They often promised love and loyalty but ultimately pushed the women away because getting close to them meant learning their imperfections and ruining their allure. The men kept the models at arm’s-length to preserve their delusion of perfection. If they didn’t know about the women on a very personal level, they wouldn’t know their faults and therefore they could remain the ethereal creatures that the Brotherhood wanted and even needed them to be. If they could continue their delusions of the models then they could continue creating their art using the models.

Lizzie Siddal and Dante Rossetti met and began a romantic relationship in 1849. By 1852, their scandalous relationship became too obvious so Rossetti began to teach Lizzie about art, which afforded him the cover to call her his pupil instead of his lover. They did not get married until 1860 when Lizzie was so sick that Dante was afraid she was going to die. It took Lizzie on her deathbed for Rossetti to actually marry her, despite having promised marriage to her many times over their eight year courtship. I suggest that Rossetti did not want Lizzie to become real to him; he wanted an epic and tortured love story like he had read about in novels. He wanted their relationship to transcend their world, but they were just human.

Further, in How They Met Themselves (1860) (Figure 4) there are two couples, both based on Dante Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal. The first couple shows a woman fainting. They are in the woods and they meet their doppelgangers. This second couple is them in a past life, reflecting Rossetti’s belief that their relationship was destiny defined—they were soulmates. This painting shows the dual nature of their relationship—the poetic lovers that Rossetti wanted them to be, compared to the sickly and doomed relationship they had in reality. The second couple has a yellow glow around them, signifying their preternatural nature as ghosts-like figures of earlier life. The Lizzie that is fainting is very pale to the extent that her face is almost fully white, which is used to show how sick she is in this life. This painting is set in medieval times, evidenced by the medieval garb that they are wearing, the swords the men have, and the fact that they are in the woods even though they live in industrialized London. This further shows how Rossetti has romanticized and idealized their relationship. Continuing this idea is the way that although Lizzie is fainting, Rossetti still has his eyes locked on the second couple, showing that he cares about the idea of them being destined to be together more than he cares about her. 

Another painting by Rossetti that further illustrates Lizzie’s very poor health is Regina Cordium (1860) (Figure 5), which means “queen of hearts.” Rossetti painted this right after his honeymoon with Siddal. She was pregnant at the time but also very sick. It is evident through the painting that she was ill: the most predominant signs are the blue-green hue of her skin, her listless expression, drooping eyelids, and unfocused eyes. The gold background worsens the sickly coloring of her skin. Conversely, her cool-toned skin amplifies the red of her beaded necklace. Rossetti has created a kind of wallpaper using hearts and x’s as a design pattern. At the bottom of the painting, Lizzie is holding an orchid. Her hand is pink and much more skin-like, contrasting her face and neck. Orchids can symbolize love, beauty, mature charm, and many children. These themes seem very fitting in the context of Rossetti and Siddals relationship and lives. The time they spent with each other was very tumultuous and lurid. Even when the relationship could have been simple, Rossetti was obsessed with keeping Lizzie away and maintaining her other-worldly charm. She was a queen of hearts, although she never fully had his.

The PBR’s contradictory ideals are also apparent when examining the Brotherhood’s attitude toward prostitution. At the end of the nineteenth century in England, modeling was seen as distasteful and promiscuous, the kind of profession that only low women with weak morals had, but it was one of the few only professions for women besides domestic work, factory labor or prostitution. Through modeling, women were alone with men in a room for hours at a time, which was seen as scandalous. For example, during Lizzie Siddal’s first time modeling, artist William Deverell’s mother and sisters were constantly coming in and out of the room. They never left them alone together for the sake of propriety and sustaining Lizzie’s public image. However, modeling allured these women because wages were so high. Lizzie, for example, worked in a millinery before she began modeling and earned 24 pounds a year, equivalent to 1,500 euros today. However, with modeling she could make more than double her earnings with much less strenuous work. While the Brotherhood were adamantly against prostitution, they perpetuated the women trading their looks and eventually their lives to them for money. There is even an example of a direct depiction of prostitution. An example of this is Holman Hunt’s The Awakened Consciousness (1853) (Figure 6) in which he creates a scene where a “kept woman” is sitting on her lover’s lap while a childhood memory is conjured by Thomas Moore’s song Oft in the Stilly Night, which the man has been playing on the piano. The key theme that Hunt tries to convey in this work is the idea of the reformation of a ruined woman. This can be seen through his use of Annie Miller, who was Hunt’s project. She was not a prostitute but she was a girl living in the London slums when Hunt met her. He made it his mission to try and save her from the fate of a fallen woman. He paid for her education and her housing, trying to raise her social status. But he refused to marry her and inadvertently put her in social limbo because she was too educated to marry a lower-class man but she was still from the lower class, so she couldn’t marry a wealthy man. The detailing that Hunt put into the woman’s dress implies that she is clean and put together and the books that are on the table and the floor are ones that one would use for self-education. Hunt is using the intricate details of his painting to hint at the reformation of this woman and the ability of all women to go through this transformation. These men wanted the women to act differently and to be different for them. They wanted the models to become new and reformed women while they perpetuated their same old habits in a less prominent and promiscuous way. 

The Brotherhood also maintained an undercurrent of promiscuity through their depictions of the women, specifically as characters in different mythological tales. An important example of this is Rossetti’s Lady Lillith (1868) (Figure 7), where he portrayed Fanny Cornforth, a former prostitute and lower-class woman, as Lillith. Lillith is known in conjunction with Adam, she believed that she was equal to him as they were created from the same soil and fled the Garden of Eden when Adam treated her as inferior to him. Fanny was known for being unashamed of her distasteful past and where the other models, like Annie Miller, took lessons to become more refined, Fanny chose not to. Her English countryside accent emphasized her commonness and her lack of education. Depicting Fanny as this unashamed woman shows how Rossetti saw her, the dress hanging off her shoulder and the way her head is angled to reveal so much of her neck and chest, exuding a sensual nature that would not be seen in a painting of a different religious female figure or, I would argue, a different model. I don’t believe Rossetti would paint Jane Morris or Lizzie Siddal in this manner, but this is how he sees Fanny, as a largely sexual being because of her background and her role in his life.

I have emphasized the duality of the treatment of the women models. They were treated as more than or less than human depending on the circumstance. While the models were typically erased from narratives about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, they still created a lasting mark on history. After all, the PRB immortalized these women and their beauty for the world to see; they are still on canvases all over the world, and they are forever models. 

Endnotes

Lucinda Hawksley, Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel (London: Andre Deutsch, 2017), 42-43.

Hawksley, Lizzie Siddal, 20-21.

“The Great Stink- How the Victorians Transformed London to Solve the Problem of Waste,” Historic England, accessed July 11, 2022, https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/archive/collections/photographs/the-great-stink/

Debra N. Mancoff, “Seeing Mrs. Morris: Photographs of Jane Morris from the Collection of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 62, no. 3 (2001): 377, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.25290/prinunivlibrchro.62.3.0376

Mancoff, “Seeing Mrs. Morris: Photographs of Jane Morris from the Collection of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 377.

Dennis T. Lanigan, “The Bridge of Sighs by Georgiana Burne-Jones (1840-1920): A metaphor for her artistic career.” The British Art Journal 20, no. 3 (2019): 111, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48617257. 

Lanigan, “The Bridge of Sighs by Georgiana Burne-Jones,” 112.

Hawksley, Lizzie Siddal, 37.

Hawksley, Lizzie Siddal, 20-21

Hawksley, Lizzie Siddal, 17-18.

Jan Marsh. Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. (Great Britain: Quartet Books Ltd, 1985), 55-67.

Stonell Walker, Stunner: The Rise and Fall of Fanny Cornforth, 78.

Bibliography

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Hawksley, Lucinda. Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel. London: Andre Deutsch, 2017.

Lanigan, Dennis T. “The Bridge of Sighs by Georgiana Burne-Jones (1840-1920): A metaphor for her artistic career.” The British Art Journal 20, no. 3 (2019): 111-115, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48617257

Mancoff, Debra N. “Seeing Mrs. Morris: Photographs of Jane Morris from the Collection of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 62, no. 3 (2001): 376-402, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.25290/prinunivlibrchro.62.3.0376 

Marsh, Jan. Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. Great Britain: Quartet Books Ltd, 1985.

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“The Great Stink- How the Victorians Transformed London to Solve the Problem of Waste,” Historic England, accessed July 11, 2022, https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/archive/collections/photographs/the-great-stink/