Flowing hair, expressive eyes, and luxurious gowns and jewels are all hallmarks of Pre-Raphaelite women. Dante Gabriel Rossetti has always been my favorite Pre-Raphaelite painter. His sensual portraits of women have abandoned the moralistic and religious fervor of the late Victorians and crossed into the realm of pure fantasy. Rossetti and his fellow painter, Edward Burne-Jones remain Victorian to the end, however, in their attitude toward the women who modeled for them. They made a habit of “discovering” their beautiful models in lower class and impoverished settings, then grooming them to appear as ladies in the spirit of Henry Higgins’ transformation of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. Rossetti expressed contempt for his women models even after their transformation. For example he went so far as to paint the beautiful Alexa Wilding with an unusually low brow to symbolize her lack of intellectual development and lower class origins. Of the many favorite Pre-Raphaelite models who underwent this Eliza Doolittle-like transformation; Anne Ryan was discovered at a sketching club, Ellen Frazer was a friend’s maidservant, Elizabeth Siddall was found working in a bonnet shop, Annie Miller was discovered in a slum yard behind Rossetti’s studio, Louisa Ruth Herbert was an actress (not a respectable profession at the time), Fanny Cornworth was a prostitute, Ellen Smith was a laundress, Alexa Wilding was a dressmaker, Jane Morris was an embroiderer, Maria Zamboco was a sculptor and medallist, Marie Spartali became a painter, and Anne Mary Howitt and Julia Margaret Cameron were artists.
I painted this copy of Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata (1859) which is typical of the portraits he produced. The model, with her gorgeous jewels, full lips and floral adornments illustrates the sensual side of femininity that well-brought-up Victorian women were not supposed to express or acknowledge. Her loose hair had erotic significance since respectable Victorian adult women always wore their hair up. Rossetti’s model for this painting was Fanny Cornworth who was formerly a prostitute. The title is borrowed from a colorful story by Bocaccio about a woman with many lovers whose “much-kissed mouth” renews its freshness. Holman Hunt, another painter of Rossetti’s circle regarded this portrait as lewd, which perhaps says more about Victorian repression than anything else. The predominantly young male, middle-class painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, as they called themselves, had little income and did not yet have the means to get married. Small wonder then, that their paintings are filled with the imagery of yearning and desire.
Interestingly, no small number of the women who modeled for the Pre-Raphaelites, including their models, sisters, wives and daughters, also were or became artists themselves, though they generally received scant recognition for their art in a society that limited and constrained women’s roles to wife and mother, virgin or whore. Women Pre-Raphaelite artists include Joanna Mary Boyce (married to painter Henry Wells), Emily Hunt (painter Holman Hunt’s sister), Rebecca Solomon (sister to two painters), Lucy and Catherine Madox Brown (trained in their father’s studio), Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, Evelyn de Morgan, and Kate Bunce.
For more on this topic, I recommend Jan Marsh’s splendidly illustrated book, Pre-Raphaelite Women: Images of Femininity. For more about the accomplished women of that circle, see also Jan Marsh’s book, The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood.
All content copyright 2010 by Susan Sternau. All rights reserved.
