In preraphaelite art we observe female subjects with expressive gazes adorned by red or black hair that frame their pensive visages, a bit detached from the world around them.
Their bodies are never caged or made stiff by victorian clothes; preraphaelite artists were convinced that the female body was beautiful in its natural form so it was useless to hide it behind corsets and heavy clothing.
The fact that a lot of paintings portrait women with red hair is another anticomformist act of the brotherhood; a lot of women with crimson hair were associated with witchcraft and sinful desire; these superstitions were still spread in the victorian era. One of the most famous women to pose for the brotherhood was Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall -known after her wedding with Gabriel Dante Rossetti as Elizabeth Siddal – a model, poet and artist.
Famous paintings by her were her self-portrait of 1857 and The Haunted Wood of 1856. Found in a shop at Cranbourne Alley by Walter Howell Deverell (artist that made A Pet, the mock marriage of Orlando and Rosalin) she was introduced to the brotherhood and became one of the main muses.
The first poem of the three presented at the end of the page takes inspiration from the Ophelia of John Everett Millais; painted in a two-year period (1851-1852). The model is the cited above Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall.
The woman remained immersed in a bathtub full of cold water even when one of the lamps that was supposed to keep her warm broke.
Siddal came down with bronchitis which will mark the downfall of her health, and culminate in her death at the age of thirty-two because of suicide after taking a lot of laudanum.
A call-back to the tragic end of the character for which she posed, the subject of the painting being the shakespearian character of Ophelia of Hamlet, the sweet daughter of Polonius and the object of longing of the men and Hamlet in the tragedy.
The maiden starts to fall into depression after Hamlet reproaches her love and becomes mad after she discovers that Hamlet assassinated her father, Polonius.
Ophelia’s death isn’t shown, rather it is described by her mother Gertrude to Laerte, brother of hers:
The woman explains the death of the girl; Ophelia went to pick bouquet of flowers to become more beautiful, but didn’t notice a fallen branch of a willow that makes her fall in a river where she meets her untimely death.
The poem Rest in thy bed, Sweet Ophelia aims to let the spirit of the maiden rest in an eternal slumber, away from the lustful gazes of men and the violences suffered in life, recalling bucolic landscapes and fairy creatures present in other shakespearian works.