Rossetti's Portraits of Elizabeth Siddal: A Catalogue of the Drawings and Watercolours

The story behind the unique series of Rossetti's drawings of his Muse and wife Elizabeth Siddal is the story of a love affair which has all the elements of high Victorian Melodrama - romance, obsession, ill-health, tragic death and mysterious events in a graveyard.
Rossetti first met Elizabeth in 1852 soon after she had been 'discovered' working in the back room of a milliner's shop. He fell headlong in love with her and later claimed that on this day 'he felt his destiny was defined'. For Rossetti, Elizabeth represented the ideal woman. She possessed the attributes of the perfect 'stunner' - red gold hair, and luminous eyes - and her whole attitude of fragility, expressive of melancholy, appealed deeply to the most romantic of British poet painters.
Elizabeth's influence on Rossetti's work was profound; in particular she inspired in him a spirit of refinement and austerity which he was never able to find again, and is nowhere more obvious than in the series of wonderfully obsessive portraits which are reproduced together for the first time in this book.