THE OTHER WOMAN
Kathryn Hughes on restoring Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s lesser-known muse to her rightful place in the history of the Pre-Raphaelites
The true story of a lost Pre-Raphaelite muse
The woman in the picture is wearing a gown that has fallen open to reveal an expanse of creamy neck and chest. Her tumble of glorious red-gold hair adds to a pervasive sense of undoneness, while her mouth is so thickly quilted that it is unable to hold itself decently shut. As if to underscore the point that it is the woman’s sensuality that is the real subject of his painting, the artist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, provided the title Bocca Baciata, which translates as ‘the kissed mouth’.
Shift forward about 50 years. It is 1907 and a 72-year-old woman has just been deposited at Graylingwell Asylum, a red-bricked facility outside Chichester recently set up to cater for the insane. She has arrived from the local workhouse and has no living relatives. She has given her name as Sarah Hughes, and her strong local Sussex accent suggests that she hasn’t travelled far in life. A domestic servant from nearby Brighton perhaps, or a farmworker from one of the smallholdings up on the South Downs.
Sarah Hughes didn’t reveal much in the two years she spent at Graylingwell Asylum before her death in 1909. Today, we’d probably conclude she had dementia, but in their notes the Graylingwell authorities simply call her ‘a weak-minded old woman’ who talked nonsense. Still, if anyone listened, really listened, to what the stout, very deaf patient on Ward A was saying, they might have picked up the outlines of another life entirely. For Sarah Hughes was almost the sole survivor of the Pre-Raphaelite community, that bohemian crew of beautiful young women and visionary young men who had painted a new world into being.
Back then, Sarah had been known as Fanny Cornforth – the name she adopted when she started work as an artist’s model in the 1850s – and she sat for a series of pictures by her lover Dante Gabriel Rossetti that revolutionised English art. That’s her in Bocca Baciata, her lips so luscious that one friend of Rossetti’s joked that they begged to be kissed away. She’s the model, too, for the sultry Fair Rosamund, waiting scandalously in her boudoir for her married lover, flushed with desire. And there she is in The Blue Bower, managing to be both feminine and powerful in a costume that renders her as gorgeous and as fierce as a Tudor prince.
Rossetti was painting the disconcertingly assertive Fanny as a new kind of woman for a new decade. By the 1860s, middle-class women were beginning to campaign for improvements in education and employment. Here was the first sighting of the New Woman of the late-Victorian period – economically and sexually independent of male control and, to be honest, just a little terrifying.
Fanny was much more than Rossetti’s favourite model of his middle period. For 25 years she was also his partner. She took care of him in sickness and health, nursed him when he descended into madness over the suicide of his ‘official’ wife Lizzie Siddal and looked on hopelessly while he dallied with Jane Morris, the wife of his best friend and fellow artist William Morris. Yet while Lizzie and Jane have always played a starring role in Rossetti’s many biographies, Fanny has been either erased altogether or consigned to a walk-on part.
Snobbery is to blame. Fanny shared the same respectable working-class background as Lizzie and Jane. But the difference was that she refused to change the way she spoke or dressed in order to fit in with the middle-class Pre-Raphaelite circle. Friends of Rossetti were apt to snigger when they went around to the Chelsea home he shared with Fanny and found her talking 19 to the dozen in her rustic burr, dressed not in the flowing unstructured gowns of the Aesthetic movement, but in the height of frilled and corseted fashion. Nasty rumours even circulated that she had been a prostitute whom Rossetti had picked up one night on the Strand. The moment Rossetti died in 1882 at the age of 53, his family made certain that Fanny was ejected permanently from his afterlife. Moving from one rented lodging to another as her money dwindled, she eventually found herself back in her native Sussex, which is how she came to end up in Chichester’s workhouse. The asylum staff who admitted her can have had no clue that they were dealing with a woman whom the painter Whistler once described as ‘sumptuous’. For the case notes reveal that Sarah Hughes then weighed 12 stone, and that her beautiful light-auburn hair was ‘brown-grey’. Perhaps the greatest indignity, though, is this: the woman once reckoned to have the most kissable mouth in England was missing all her teeth. ‘Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum’ by Kathryn Hughes (£20, 4th Estate) is published on 26 January.