Jane BurdenFacts are fine things and the library has a very good backgrounder to the Christchurch Art Gallery’s Morris & Co exhibition that can help viewers find all they need to know about The Firm. Being terminally trivial myself, I prefer rumour and conjecture about the PRB WAGs so when a slide of Jane Burden flashed on the screen during a public lecture on the exhibition my mind wandered to the ’stunners’ – the models who defined beauty for the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Jane Burden was a favourite model of both Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and was immortalised by Henry James as “A figure cut out of a missal–out of one of Rossetti’s or Hunt’s pictures–to say this gives a faint idea of her, because when such an image puts on flesh and blood, it is an apparition of fearful and wonderful intensity. It’s hard to say whether she’s a grand synthesis of all the Pre-Raphaelite pictures ever made–or they are a “keen analysis” of her–whether she’s an original or a copy. In either case she is a wonder.” She did have tooth-ache at the time of James’ visit, perhaps that accounted for the intensity.

Morris was the one who married Jane, but her relationship with Rossetti continued after the marriage, as depicted in the intriguing novel The Wayward Muse, billed as a “rich and romantic story of the passionate love triangle between William Morris, founder of the Arts and Crafts movement; his mentor, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti; and the woman they both love.”

Lizzie Siddal (or Siddall) is my favourite of the ’stunners’, probably because she seems the most tragic. She was an artist and poet herself but marriage to Rossetti didn’t save her from an early death from an overdose of laudanum.

In a paroxym of grief or over-acting Rossetti threw some of his poems into her grave with her, only to have her exhumed later so he could hook them out of the coffin and publish them. Legend has it that she was untouched and that her hair had continued growing so that the coffin was full of red hair. Such are the blatantly untrue details dear to a shallow person’s heart.