Other Women (20 page)

Unlike her rival Caroline Graves, Martha Rudd (1845–1919) did nothing to hide her even humbler origins. She was the daughter of a shepherd, James Rudd and his wife Mary (
née
Andrew), and had four brothers and three sisters.

In 1861 Martha and her sister Alice were working as domestic servants for an innkeeper in Yarmouth. It was there that she probably met Collins, who was staying at the coast while he did research for his novel
Armadale
in 1864. Collins, at 40, was twice her age.

It wasn’t until 1868 that it was known that Collins had moved his much younger second mistress into a house at 33 Bolsover Street. The following year Martha gave birth to their first child, a girl they called Marian. She was followed by another daughter, Harriet, two years later and finally by a boy, William, in 1874. Only William’s birth is registered as the two girls were born before it became the law to register births.

Martha and her children were set up comfortably but not lavishly in a house not too far from Collins’s dwelling with Caroline. The children visited their father and his first mistress at his house, but it is unlikely that Martha ever set foot there. Martha was also never given the opportunity to socialise with Collins and did not even get to travel on the Continent with him. She did receive a handsome allowance though.

When Collins died it was not considered seemly for Martha and the children to attend the funeral. They had a wreath sent to his other house. Caroline did attend the funeral, but this meant that people of higher social standing could not as they would be tainted by having been received by Collins’s long-time mistress. Lady Millais, among others, sent an empty coach as a mark of respect. When Caroline died, six years after Collins, Martha took over the job of attending the grave in which Caroline was also laid to rest.

Is there a more clichéd subject than the painter falling in love with his model? Usually the model is young, female and often nude or draped in alluring fabric. The more the painter concentrates on getting right the form, the atmosphere and the essence of the subject, the more the bond might be strengthened. At least this would be the romantic ideal of a nineteenth-century male painter and his female model. For the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood the ethereal beauty of the model was of utmost importance; she needed the look.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848 by three earnest young artists: William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Later, four more members joined the brotherhood: William Michael Rossetti (Dante’s brother), James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner.

The inspiration for the art produced by these men was the art, poetry and stories that came before Raphael, the great Italian painter: medieval manuscripts, Arthurian legends, and tragic, romantic tales of lost love. The colours were rich and bright and nature was to be observed closely. And there was a particular type of beauty that nearly all the men admired.

Models were discovered, shared, fallen in love with, made mistresses, married, and became the mistresses of another. The stories of the women involved with the Pre-Raphaelites are so intertwined that it can be difficult to find where one affair begins and another ends.

Let’s begin with the one model who was the closest to providing this standard: Elizabeth Siddal.

Elizabeth Siddal was born on 25 July 1829 to a maker of cutlery, Charles Crooke Siddal and his wife, Eleanor (
née
Evans). This was a respectable lower-middle-class family and Elizabeth was brought up to be literate, good and useful. She was expected to earn a living in her teens until she married into her own class, perhaps a craftsman or business owner like her father. Whether Lizzie would have followed this conventional path if she hadn’t been snapped up by the Pre-Raphaelite fraternity is debatable. Lizzie was already a great reader of poetry, having discovered a poem by Tennyson on a fragment of newspaper used to wrap the butter. It is said to have inspired the girl to begin writing her own. For a cutlery-maker’s daughter this was rather ominous.

Lizzie was always a pale-skinned girl, slim and with masses of bushy red hair. Her eyes were large and heavy lidded, giving her an other-worldly look. A painter associated with the brotherhood, Walter Deverell, discovered Lizzie working as a milliner. At first Deverell kept his find to himself, but as he needed to show off his work it was inevitable that Miss Siddal would become known to the other painters in the circle.

Lizzie was taken on as a model by a small number of painters on the understanding that she could keep working part-time at the hat shop. Modelling won out in the end and Lizzie became the face of Pre-Raphaelitism. The downside of being an artist’s model was some of the outrageous things one had to do. John Everett Millais decided to use Lizzie as his model for the drowning Ophelia. He filled a bathtub with water, under which he placed lamps to keep the water warm, then he bade Lizzie wear a medieval gown and lie down in the water, where he then strew flowers over her. He was a meticulous craftsman and took a long time to capture his subject to his standard of perfection. Sometimes, more often than not probably, the lamps went out and the water got cold, very cold. Lizzie got very sick. Her father was furious with the irresponsible artist and made him pay for Lizzie’s medical expenses. However, it did not put Lizzie off from working with the Brotherhood again.

It wasn’t long before Dante Gabriel Rossetti, named after the great medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri, had Lizzie almost entirely to himself. She really did become his muse and over the years he constantly drew and painted her. Rossetti, probably inspired by his namesake, took Lizzie to be his Beatrice. In 1851 he declared his love for her and within the next twelve months the pair were living together. Rossetti was not married so living with Lizzie was not adultery, she was not ‘the other woman’ but was a kept woman, unmarried and living with the man to whom she was artistic muse. And Rossetti did still have sexual affairs with other women. Lizzie was referred to as his mistress because of the fact they weren’t married. In 1853 the couple became engaged to be married, but for one reason or another Rossetti always put off the actual event. It was probably because he knew what his family’s reaction to Lizzie would be. Lizzie herself thought that Rossetti was most likely on the hunt for a newer, younger model with whom to replace her.

While she was with Rossetti Lizzie was encouraged to paint, draw and write poetry, not only by Rossetti but also by the art critic John Ruskin, the poet Algernon Swinburne and others. At one point Ruskin was paying Lizzie £150 a year for the right to all her artwork.

For most of her adult life Lizzie suffered from mysterious health problems. For decades it was believed that she had tuberculosis but in the last few years of her life evidence has emerged that suggests she had some kind of intestinal disorder. Her friends packed her off to Paris and Nice for health treatments.

Finally, in 1860, Rossetti made the commitment and married Lizzie Siddal. Why he finally did so has been speculated by all and sundry. Rossetti may have married Lizzie out of a feeling of guilt for having not married her for so long; he may have married her in response to his one-time love, Jane Burden, marrying William Morris. On Wednesday 23 May 1860 they married in St Clements Church, Hastings, with two official witnesses but no friends or family.

Elizabeth Siddal

The marriage did not mean a happy ending by any means. Lizzie continued to suffer from bad health and a feeling of insecurity. She had by this time also become addicted to laudanum, originally prescribed for pain reduction. Nevertheless, a joyous event was announced in 1861: Lizzie was pregnant. Although the pregnancy followed through to full term the baby girl was stillborn. Lizzie was grief-stricken; a year later Lizzie was dead too.

The night before Lizzie’s death has had several different accounts recorded. Swinburne, one of Lizzie’s admirers, says that there was a dinner at a restaurant, which the Rossettis both attended. Lizzie was lively, engaging and even happy; she was pregnant again. After the dinner Rossetti took his wife home, tucked her up in bed and went out again. When he returned at about midnight he found Lizzie unconscious but still alive in bed with an empty laudanum bottle beside it. Although attempts were made to revive her she died in the morning. Many years later Oscar Wilde put forth another version of the story. Lizzie was already doped up to the eyeballs on laudanum when she arrived at the restaurant. Her behaviour was wild, outrageous and embarrassing; Rossetti, humiliated and angry, took her home, put her in bed and threw the laudanum bottle at her telling her to take the lot. And then he went out.

Probably Rossetti, if he did taunt his sick wife, did so out of desperation and didn’t mean or expect her to act on it. Perhaps it was an accidental overdose, just as the inquest found. Or it could have been the build-up of arsenic in her system through long-term use of Fowler’s Solution, a popular medicine of the time, used for the improvement of the complexion. Rossetti was certainly wracked with guilt afterwards. This may have been because he wasn’t actually at home when she took the overdose. It is commonly thought he was off visiting other lady friends or was at a brothel. Full of remorse and perhaps feeling poetically romantic at his loss, Rossetti put a bundle of his unpublished poems into the casket with Lizzie before it was buried. This was another thing for him to regret.

As with Dante Alighieri after the loss of his muse Beatrice, Rossetti flung himself into a fit of work churning out yet more drawings of his beloved Lizzie. Two years after her death Rossetti picked up the painting of
Beata Beatrix
he had begun before Lizzie died. He did not complete it until 1870. It shows Lizzie as Beatrice, already pale with death but sitting in a trance with closed eyes. A dove drops a poppy into her open hands, in the background love and Dante gaze at each other. This is the death of Beatrice as immortalised in Dante Alighieri’s poem
Vita Nuova.
For Rossetti, the scholar and painter, this was his own testament to his greatest muse. Certainly it is the sketches, drawings and paintings of Lizzie that have earned him his reputation as a painter, and it is these that have fetched the biggest prices after his death.

This brings us to the tale of the equally beautiful Jane Burden. Where Lizzie Siddal had been pale skinned with red hair, the idealised Celt, Jane, was dark haired and exotic looking. Jane was born in Oxford in 1839 to Robert Burden, a stable hand, and his wife Ann, a former domestic servant. Jane and her sister Bessie were probably destined for the same work as their mother, followed by marriage and children. In 1857 the two sisters went to a production put on by the Drury Lane Theatre Company in Oxford. It just happened that Dante Rossetti and one of the later Pre-Raphaelite painters, Edward Burne-Jones, were in Oxford painting an Arthurian-themed mural for the Oxford Union library. If they had not been in Oxford when Jane Burden went to the theatre, and if the men had not noticed her (although she was definitely eye-catching) then Jane Burden may well have had a completely different kind of life. Instead she was discovered as the next Pre-Raphaelite model and was whisked back to London with them.

Rossetti saw in Jane the antithesis of his ethereal Lizzie. Jane was dark where Lizzie was fair; Jane was the model for the likes of Guinevere, a fallen and treacherous woman whose beauty caused trouble, while Lizzie was forever the angelic Beatrice; Jane’s beauty was sensuous and earthy where Lizzie’s was fragile.

Jane, as the child of lower-class folk, was uneducated. Her mother was illiterate, although there is no mention of Jane having been so too. Jane was naturally intelligent, however, and a fast learner. The painters took it upon themselves to encourage her to read, learn and improve herself. She not only became a great reader but she also became fluent in French and Italian.