![]() ![]() Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of BirminghamĪlso in that benighted, pre-digital age, documentary research required painstaking work in academic libraries, slowly transcribing diaries and correspondence by hand (no photography allowed). The Blue Bower (with Fanny Conforth as model 1865), Dante Gabriel Rossetti. As the new wave of assertive feminism surged through the 1980s, it prompted energetic inquiry into women ‘hidden from history’, such as the models, wives and muses of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. ![]() ![]() I remember repeated visits to Millbank to look at the pictures and ponder what to infer about the models.Īlthough for the Sisterhood my aim was purely biographical, the fact that Elizabeth Siddal was the only woman artist in the Tate show – and then only at the determined insistence of Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock – spoke eloquently of the patriarchal cast of art history in that benighted era, as Cherry and Pollock underlined in their semiotic analysis of Siddal’s reputation. This was useful, as I knew virtually nothing about the Pre-Raphaelites, and not much about Victorian art, being trained as a literary critic and having become a biographer. ![]() Way back when, it so happened that my research for what became the book Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (1985) chimed with the Tate Gallery exhibition of 1984 that reintroduced viewers to the Brotherhood after a long period of modernist disdain. ![]()
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