Arts and Tarts V

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelites, a group of Victorian painters dedicated to reviving the style of religious art in the Middle Ages before Raphael.


However Rossetti soon realized that there wasn’t a good market for moral religious paintings such as this one of the Holy Grail, so he quickly cast about looking for a different kind of subject. Eventually, surprise, surprise he decided on a celebration of female beauty.



One of the early models used by Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a milliner's assistant, Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, that they discovered at a London store. Before long, the 17 year old Lizzie was posing for the painters in the group and may be seen in numerous PRB works. Her delicate, romantic beauty resulted in her being called one of the Brotherhood's 'stunners'. Gradually Rossetti monopolized Siddal's modeling for himself, while the pair built an amorous relationship.


He used Lizzie in his painting The Bower Meadow along with Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris. In his original sketch he included a cherub, but quickly decided that wasn’t going to be a best seller.


So instead he switched to a scene with five female figures. Rossetti painted The Bower Meadow in characteristic fashion with attractive women with full and pouty lips, lush colours, and picturesque objects in the background. Though the title sets the scene, Rossetti focuses the composition around five female figures. These figures are essentially only two people. To give the photo a bit of bite he adds a pearl to one of the model’s hair and as we all know pearls symbolise a racy woman. He also uses an element of sexual tension between the two women in addition to just having them dancing. The zigzagging composition of the women's gazes strongly implies that the brunette is far more infatuated with the contemplative redheaded woman than vice versa. The figures strewn throughout the painting allow Rossetti to tease out rather cleverly this tension between the two women in what might otherwise be an exclusively idyllic scene.


Just as a footnote Lizzie was also the model used in Millais' renowned Ophelia