Pre-Raphaelite Sisters

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank all those who have been most influential in bringing this project to fruition. Firstly, our thanks go to Jan Marsh for raising the profile of the women of the Pre-Raphaelite movement by curating the Pre-Raphaelite Sisters exhibition (October 2019 to January 2020), and for proposing the idea of an accompanying conference to Liz Prettejohn. Many thanks also to Liz, who had the confidence to place the organisation of the conference in the hands of the editors, and to Marjorie Coughlan for her help in staging the event. The two-day conference, Pre-Raphaelite Sisters: Making Art, was held at the University of York in December 2019, with support from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. It was extremely successful and generated a great deal of interest in the women of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. It was this success that led Barrie Bullen to approach us with the idea of a publication, and we owe our thanks to him for his interest. We are grateful to Christiana Payne and Dinah Roe for their assistance in preparing the introduction to this volume. We would also like to thank all our contributors, without whom this collection would not have been possible. Finally, our thanks must go to our long-suffering families and friends, who have given us their unfailing support throughout.

Glenda Youde and Robert Wilkes
September 2022

Introduction: ‘A Silent Passing By’ – Pre-Raphaelite Women in Context

In her preface to the latest edition of her book Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood in 2018, Jan Marsh reflected that

since […] 1985, there has been a vast expansion of research and writing about the women of the Pre-Raphaelite circle from a feminist perspective. […] [T]‌he lives detailed in these pages are no longer as obscure as they were when I first began.¹

First published in 1985, Marsh’s Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood quickly became a field-defining text. It was the first book to consider, in detail, the lives and works of individual women associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, whether they were artists, writers, artists’ models or creative or romantic partners.² The book was followed in 1989 by Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, co-authored by Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn; and in 1997–8 by Marsh and Nunn’s exhibition Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists (with an accompanying catalogue that was an expanded ←1 | 2→version of their 1989 book).³ These texts challenged the received idea that women contributed little to the development of Pre-Raphaelitism beyond their capacities as artists’ models, inspiring the languid female figures that have long been synonymous with Pre-Raphaelitism. Modelling is a valuable part of the artistic process – many Pre-Raphaelite paintings would not exist without their female models – but the women’s other talents and achievements were frequently overlooked until feminist scholars like Marsh, Nunn, Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock shone new light upon them in the 1980s.

During the earlier waves of Pre-Raphaelite scholarship in the twentieth century, scholars devoted most of their energies to individual male painters like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones, who were honoured with memorial exhibitions, catalogues raisonnés, biographies, scholarly articles and film biopics. William E. Fredeman’s Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study (1965), published at a critical point in the development of Pre-Raphaelite studies in the mid-1960s, included bibliographies for sixty-five individual figures. Only two of these were women, and both with a close connection to D. G. Rossetti: Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal.⁴ The broader survey exhibitions of Pre-Raphaelite art were also almost exclusively male. An exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1923 contained 338 works, thirty-three of which were by women: eight by Siddal, twenty-four by Joanna Boyce Wells and one by Florence Caxton.⁵ The centenary of the PRB’s founding in 1948 saw a flurry of exhibitions featuring predominantly male artists. Those at Birmingham Art Gallery and the Whitechapel Art Gallery included only one woman each: Siddal.⁶ (Nicolette Gray, reviewing the ←2 | 3→Birmingham show, wrote that the Siddal works on display demonstrated that ‘the view that she was just an imitator of her husband [Rossetti] is not tenable’.⁷) Forty years later, the situation had changed little: out of the 250 works included in the major Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1984, there were only three works by one woman – Siddal once again.⁸

These twentieth-century exhibitions perpetuated an overarching narrative of masculine genius (or geniuses), beginning with Millais, Hunt, Rossetti and Madox Brown in 1848–53, then introducing figures like William Morris and Burne-Jones in the late 1850s, before petering out in the 1860s, by which time Pre-Raphaelitism in its original form, often summarised by the creed of ‘truth-to-nature’, was merged with Rossettian bohemianism and the Aesthetic Movement. Women who did more than simply model for the men’s paintings (although, as mentioned, we should not disparage this role) were not sufficiently integrated into these broader narratives as anything more than one-dimensional ‘muses’ and ‘mistresses’. As Cherry has highlighted, Alan Bowness’s introduction to the 1984 Tate catalogue even attributed the dissolution of the PRB in 1853 to the fact that ‘[g]‌irls had now entered the Pre-Raphaelite circle’ (distracting the men from their aesthetic goals), and Bowness dwelt at length on Rossetti’s romantic affairs – a subject which, even by the 1980s, had received more than its fair share of attention.⁹ These accounts typically did not mention that Jane Morris was a prodigious embroider, Georgiana Burne-Jones a draughtswoman or Maria Terpsithea Cassavetti Zambaco a skilled metal worker and sculptor.¹⁰ Conversely, Christina Rossetti was thought of solely ←3 | 4→as a poet, but rarely as an artists’ model (she sat to her brother for two paintings and numerous portraits) or as an illustrator of her own poems.¹¹

Women were therefore denied a multiplicity of creative roles; they were often ‘one thing or the other’, either an artists’ model or a painter, but never both. (Meanwhile, scholars were quick to demonstrate William Morris’s skills in multiple creative fields, or D. G. Rossetti’s double talents as a poet and a painter.) An exception to this pigeonholing tendency was Siddal, whose reputation as an artist and poet sat, if a little awkwardly, alongside her known capacity as a model – we have seen that she was often the woman artist of choice for the twentieth-century survey exhibitions. Pre-Raphaelitism’s immediate association with the art of painting in the popular imagination meant that women’s contributions to other creative fields, such as literature, sculpture, architecture, the decorative arts and sartorial practices, received even less acknowledgement – an imbalance which some of the chapters in this book also aim to redress.

Paradoxically, female creativity was valued and encouraged in the women’s lifetimes. Alison Smith has highlighted the fact that the PRB’s unconventional social structure, removed from the public sphere, ‘allowed women, as amateurs, to be admitted on more equal terms than they would have been at most art schools of the time’.¹² In an article about Siddal from 1903, William Michael Rossetti observed that her artworks were likely to be treated with undue harshness by post-Victorian audiences:

[I]‌n the present day, when vigorous brush-work and calculated ‘values’ are more thought of than inventiveness or sentiment, [Siddal’s] performances would secure little beyond a sneer at first, a glance afterwards, and a silent passing by. But in those ←4 | 5→early ‘Præraphaelite’ days, and in the Præraphaelite environment, which was small, and ringed around by hostile forces, things were estimated differently.¹³

Siddal showed her drawings and watercolours in the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at Russell Place in 1857, while the Exhibition of British Art which toured the United States in the winter of 1857–8 included, according to Cherry, ‘a substantial number of works by women’, Siddal among them.¹⁴ Holman Hunt, writing in 1905, recalled complimenting Siddal’s ‘stunning drawings’ when he saw them in the Russell Place exhibition (although he had little to say about them otherwise).¹⁵ Enthusiastic responses to Siddal’s designs by the likes of Alfred and Emily Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Allingham and John Ruskin are all recorded in documentary material from the time. As Cherry has shown, the tendency to devalue artworks by women that had formerly been admired in the ‘early Pre-Raphaelite days’ of the 1850s continued well into the twentieth century.¹⁶

As Marsh mentioned in 2018, the situation has greatly improved in the present century, which has seen even more exhibitions, scholarly monographs, biographies and articles devoted to the lives and works of individual Pre-Raphaelite women artists, writers and designers. An exhibition devoted to the artworks of Lucy and Catherine Madox Brown was recently held at the Watts Gallery in Surrey.¹⁷ Between 2012 and 2019 there were solo exhibitions dedicated to Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, May Morris, Christina Rossetti, Marie Spartali Stillman and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon held in Britain and the United States.¹⁸ The last two shows were curated and ←5 | 6→co-curated by Margaretta S. Frederick, whose chapter in this volume presents further research into Barbara Bodichon’s artistic and political ideals. These monographic studies have served as a corrective to the earlier survey exhibitions which omitted women artists – and even to more recent examples like the Tate’s Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (2012–13), which included a small number of works by women: four by Siddal, two by Rosa Brett, one by Florence Caxton and three embroidered pieces (all for William Morris’s bed) executed by Jane and May Morris, Lily Yeats, Maude Deacon and Ellen Wright.¹⁹

In literary studies, new monographs have either given Pre-Raphaelite women writers due credit for the first time – Serena Trowbridge’s scholarly edition of Siddal’s poetry from 2018 is a notable example – or offered fresh perspectives on known writers, like Emma Mason’s Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (2018) and Anne Woolley’s Poems of Elizabeth Siddal in Context (2021).²⁰ New ‘lives’ of Pre-Raphaelite women have examined them with the biographical techniques previously reserved for the male figures: ‘Effie’ Gray Millais by Suzanne Fagence Cooper, Fanny Cornforth by Kirsty Stonell Walker and Frances Graham by Andrew Gailey, to highlight a few.²¹ The publication of original letters by Christina Rossetti, Jane Morris and Joanna Boyce Wells has also allowed the private textual voices ←6 | 7→of Pre-Raphaelite women writers, models and artists to be read and studied for the first time.²²

To this layering of representations can be added the fictionalised versions of some Pre-Raphaelite women in films, television shows and the performing arts. The BBC series Desperate Romantics (2009) included portrayals of Siddal, Annie Miller, Fanny Cornforth, Jane Morris and Effie Gray, while the film Effie Gray (2014) focused on the titular character’s relationship with Millais during her marriage with John Ruskin. The recent re-releases of an earlier BBC series about the PRB, The Love School (1975), and of Ken Russell’s phantasmagorical film Dante’s Inferno (1967), have enabled viewers to revisit twentieth-century interpretations of several Pre-Raphaelite women.²³ ‘Lizzie Siddal’, a stage play about Siddal’s life by Jeremy Green, ran at the Arcola Theatre in London in 2013, while contemporary artist Margje Bijl has reinterpreted Rossetti’s images of Jane Morris in a variety of media, including performances and works on paper, as part of her ongoing project Reflections on Jane Morris.²⁴