Portrait of Elizabeth Siddal Resting, Holding a Parasol

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

about 1852–1855

Pen and brown ink with light brown and gray wash, on ivory-finished paper, Pen, Ink

J. Paul Getty Museum

Dante Gabriel Rossetti sharply foreshortened Elizabeth Siddal's sleeping body, allowing her voluminous skirt to dominate the drawing's foreground while her torso and head, more faintly drawn, recede in the background. Siddal began sitting for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood artists in 1849, when she was about fifteen. By 1852 she was working exclusively for painter-poet Rossetti and became his lover and his pupil. Rossetti made more than sixty intimate drawings of her in the 1850s, in which she usually appeared in some type of repose.