With her pale face and red hair flowing through the reeds, Ofelia keeps her eyes open and her lips beautifully parted, her hands palms up, as if the imminence of death provides her with a state of extreme pleasure. The Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais (1829-1896) thus immortalized Shakespeare’s tragic heroine, the tormented young woman who goes mad when she learns that her beloved, her Hamlet, has mistakenly killed her father, her Polonium, and ends up drowning. in a creek The young she has fallen while she was trying to hang a garland of flowers on a willow branch and now she sinks into the muddy waters, still singing. The model for the most popular painting at Tate Britain is Elizabeth Siddal, who was also a poet and painter, and whose unhappy life bears many similarities to that of Ophelia herself. She included her tragic and untimely death from a laudanum overdose.
“You cannot tell what a wonderfully beautiful creature I have found… She is like a queen, magnificently tall…” Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862) was 19 years old and working as a seamstress in a millinery when she met the artist Walter Deverell, who introduced her to Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, two of the most prominent painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a secret society founded in 1848 that rejected academic oppression and advocated a return to nature and the aesthetic innocence of Italian artists before Raphael. She was guided by a single principle: “The most absolute truth, which is obtained from nature and only from nature, down to the most insignificant detail”, in the words of the painter and art critic John Ruskin.
Millais took this effort to meet reality to the last consequences. He painted his Ophelia in two phases and in two different places. The landscape part was done outdoors in the Hogsmill River, near Ewen, over five months (the wild flowers that appear in the painting, violets, poppies, pansies… they bloom at different times of the year), while the figure of the drowned young woman was painted in his studio, with the red-haired model submerged for hours and hours in the water of a tin bathtub.
To keep the water warm, Millais placed some oil lamps under the claw-foot tub, but on a particularly cold winter day, when the painter realized that the candles had gone out it was already too late. Siddal, cold, caught pneumonia that would trigger a series of health problems from which she would never recover.
According to Lucinda Hawksley, author of Lizzie Siddal, The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel, the young woman embodied the opposite of the Victorian ideal of beauty: she was tall, painfully thin, with red, inflamed hair and melancholy eyes. But thanks to the success of the paintings in which she appeared, she helped change “public opinion about beauty.” She was the favorite model of the Pre-Raphaelites, jumping from studio to studio and from painting to painting, until Dante Gabriel Rossetti, obsessed with her, finally managed to get her to pose only for him and become her mistress.
Encouraged by Ruskin, who assigned her an annual salary of 150 pounds, she learned to paint – she was the only woman to exhibit in London in 1857 together with her Pre-Raphaelite colleagues – and when she felt very weak, the pain barely allowed her to get up from the bed. bed, he began to write poetry (his complete work, translated by Eva Gallud, was published for the first time in Spain in 2019 by the publishing house Ya lo dice Casimiro Parker). But like Ophelia’s own relationship with Hamlet, her relationship with Rossetti was tortuous and sad. For ten years they were engaged, the painter was reluctant to set a wedding date. He was jealous, more than a serial infidel, and she, addicted to laudanum (a very powerful preparation with a high content of opium) since the episode in the bathtub, was increasingly depressed and unhappy.
Siddal tried to escape the control that both Ruskin and Rossetti had over her and moved to Sheffield, her father’s birthplace. The news that reached her of the painter’s adventures with other women put an end to the relationship, but when she became seriously ill in 1860, Rossetti accepted a marriage license and they married. They honeymooned in Paris, returning with two adopted stray dogs, but she soon gave birth to a stillborn daughter. She never recovered from depression. Returning home one day, she found her fast asleep in bed with the empty laudanum bottle beside her. There was also a note from her, which Hawksley says she burned to prevent her from being declared a suicide. She was 32 years old.
Rossetti added a macabre postscript to his life. He buried her manuscript with her unpublished poems with her, something he regretted seven years later, when he decided to exhume her grave to rescue the notebook and publish a book.
