John Everett Millais

Thursday

Lucasta Miller

An artist in her own right: the genius of Elizabeth Siddal

Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti, as this new book calls her in a break with convention, is better known by her maiden name: Elizabeth Siddal or Siddall (the spelling is uncertain, as is much else about her). The Pre-Raphaelite icon was familiar to the public as the model for John Everett Millais’s ‘Ophelia’ sinking to her watery grave and as the muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who eventually married her. Not long afterwards she died of an opiate overdose in 1862, aged 32. Her early demise, echoing her association with Ophelia, left her ripe for myth-making, as first explored by Jan Marsh in her groundbreaking The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (1989). By

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Stimulating little exhibition: Scent and the Art of the pre-Raphaelites reviewed

Scent and the Art of the pre-Raphaelites… there’s an obvious problem here: how do you represent one sense by another? Synesthesia is a neurological condition whereby some people do just that: they experience colour when they hear music, or taste words – think of the Revd Sydney Smith describing heaven as eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets. There may come a time when we get all-enveloping sensory effects when we look at paintings – an exhibition on medieval women at the British Library uses the stink of sulphur to suggest Julian of Norwich’s vision of hell and strawberry and honey for Margery Kempe’s scent of angels – but