I thought about this wonderful drawing a lot when reading Elizabeth Macneal’s debut novel The Doll Factory, a book that manages to be both a page-turning thriller and a thoughtful, moving exploration of what it meant to be a woman and an artist in the 19th century. The muse has become the artist, fizzing with energy the man who famously immortalised the faces of the beautiful “stunners” he painted has become a subject himself.
This drawing shows her hunched over a drawing board, pen in hand, looking intensely at her subject – Rossetti himself – as she sketches.
But the Lizzie Siddal in this inky sketch is very different from the languid, heavy-lidded girl who gazes away from the viewer in galleries around the world.
There was nothing unusual about this - over the course of their tumultuous relationship, Rossetti would produce thousands of images of the pale, red-haired woman who later became his wife. In September 1853, the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti drew a picture of his favourite model and muse Elizabeth Siddal.
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