Elizabeth Siddal

By 1854 Elizabeth Siddal had already sat for some of the best-known Pre-Raphaelite pictures, most famously as the drowning Ophelia, posed in a bathtub that went cold while she held still. This drawing is not one of those roles. Rossetti set her down as herself, in a plain navy dress with her red hair pinned up in the fashion of the day, during the long hours the two spent together while he taught her to draw and paint. Around this time she was becoming an artist in her own right. Within a year the critic John Ruskin would grant her an allowance to make her own work. Rossetti drew dozens of these quiet studies of her across the mid-1850s. They married in 1860, six years after this sheet was made.