Ophelia resurfaces: pre-Raphaelite muse is recognised as a skilled artist

Elizabeth Siddal, immortalised in the painting by John Everett Millais, is finally being judged for her art at a new Tate exhibition

She is immortalised as the drowning Ophelia in John Everett Millais’s celebrated 1850s painting and as the auburn-haired model for several pre-Raphaelite artists in the mid-19th century. After dying prematurely aged 32, Elizabeth Siddal was marked down for decades as a depressive and laudanum addict, and was portrayed as such in Ken Russell’s 1967 BBC film Dante’s Inferno – named after her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

More recently, she has been mythologised in several TV dramas and novels – even as a vampire victim.