Rossetti's Lady Lilith: The Pre-Raphaelite Stunner as Adam's First Wife
- Zocine Art
- 1 day ago
- 8 min read
Dante Gabriel Rossetti began the picture now called Lady Lilith in 1866 and worked on it intermittently for the next seven years, repainting the face at least once, until the canvas was finally signed and sold in 1873. The painting is one hundred by eighty-five centimetres, oil on canvas, and shows a half-length figure of a beautiful young woman in a white loose-necked gown seated in an interior, combing her long copper-coloured hair, looking down at her own reflection in a small mirror she holds in her left hand. The picture is one of the most concentrated examples of the visual genre Rossetti effectively invented in the 1860s and 1870s — the so-called Pre-Raphaelite stunner, a half-length female portrait, mythologically named, surrounded by symbolic objects, and aimed at the eye rather than at narrative. The title of this one names Lilith, the figure from medieval Jewish folklore who, in one tradition, was Adam's first wife before Eve.
Lilith — the figure behind the name
Lilith is not a Biblical figure in any straightforward sense. She appears once in the Hebrew text of the prophet Isaiah (chapter 34, verse 14), in a passage describing the desolation of Edom, where the word lîlîṯ is rendered in the King James Bible as "screech owl" and in modern translations variously as "night creature" or "night monster." The Hebrew word is connected etymologically to the Akkadian lilitu, a class of female night demons in Babylonian and Sumerian mythology, and the figure has roots going back at least to the second millennium BCE.
The story Rossetti drew on, in which Lilith is Adam's first wife, is post-Biblical — it appears in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a satirical Hebrew text of the eighth to tenth centuries CE, which expands the Genesis creation story. In the Ben Sira version, God creates Adam and Lilith from the same earth at the same moment. Lilith refuses to lie beneath Adam in sexual congress, arguing that she was created at the same instant from the same material and is therefore his equal. Adam objects. Lilith pronounces the secret name of God and flies away to the wilderness, where she becomes the mother of demons and a killer of newborn children. God then creates Eve from Adam's rib, so that the second woman would be physically derivative and therefore submissive. The Lilith-as-first-wife story circulated in late-medieval Jewish folklore, was absorbed into Kabbalah, and was published in English in the nineteenth century in scholarly translations from Hebrew sources Rossetti certainly read.
The model and the painter's life
The model for the first version of Lady Lilith was Fanny Cornforth — Rossetti's housekeeper, model, lover, and intermittent companion from roughly 1856 onward. Cornforth was a former agricultural labourer's daughter from Sussex who had moved to London as a young woman and modelled for several of the Pre-Raphaelite painters; she was the model for many of Rossetti's most sensual pictures of the 1860s. Her hair — heavy, copper-blonde, abundant — was the visual feature Rossetti found most compelling and is the dominant feature of the Lady Lilith portrait.
The picture's history is complicated by the fact that Rossetti repainted the face in 1872-73, replacing Cornforth's features with those of Alexa Wilding, a younger model who had become Rossetti's primary sitter in the late 1860s. The reasons for the substitution are debated: some critics attribute it to a quarrel between Rossetti and Cornforth; others to commercial pressure from the patron Frederick Leyland, who had commissioned the picture and may have preferred the more refined Wilding features. The final canvas, as it now exists in a Delaware collection, shows Wilding's face on Cornforth's body, in a sense — the body and the hair were Cornforth's, the face is Wilding's.
The symbolic objects — what the picture actually contains
Almost every object in the picture has a programmatic meaning. The white poppies behind Lilith's shoulder are the standard nineteenth-century symbol for sleep, dreams, and (more covertly, in the 1870s) opium and laudanum — the same drug Elizabeth Siddal had died of ten years earlier and which Rossetti himself was, by 1866, taking heavily for insomnia. The red roses at the lower left are the standard symbol of carnal love (as opposed to the white lily of spiritual love that appears in Rossetti's earlier devotional pictures of the 1850s). The small foxgloves visible in the floral arrangement are deadly in large doses and are a Victorian emblem of insincere or false beauty.
The mirror in Lilith's left hand is the picture's structural object. It is the small handheld mirror of vanitas iconography — the same type of mirror that appears in Dutch seventeenth-century vanitas still lifes to signal the transience of physical beauty. But Lilith is not contemplating her own mortality in the mirror, the way a Memling Vanity does. She is calmly admiring herself. The picture is therefore an inversion of the vanitas tradition: the mirror is present, but the moral commentary on vanity is absent. Lilith looks at herself, finds herself beautiful, and is content. The mirror's small size — it cannot reflect anything except her own face — is also load-bearing. Lilith is the only object inside her own visual world.
Behind Lilith on the wall, half-visible above the floral arrangement, is the edge of a roundel containing a tiny scene of trees and grass — the only outdoor element in the picture. Rossetti described it in correspondence as a glimpse of Eden, the garden Lilith was expelled from in the medieval folklore. It is the one element in the picture that places Lilith specifically as the mythological first wife rather than just as a beautiful Victorian woman. Without the small painted Eden in the background, the picture would be a generic Pre-Raphaelite stunner; with it, the picture becomes the post-expulsion portrait of Adam's first wife living alone in the wilderness, eternally beautiful, eternally content with her own beauty, eternally unbothered by the human consequence of the Fall in the world she has left behind.
The sonnet on the frame — "Body's Beauty"
Rossetti, who was a published poet as well as a painter, wrote a sonnet to accompany Lady Lilith and had it inscribed on the picture's frame. The sonnet, titled Body's Beauty, is included in his 1870 collection Poems as the second of a pair — the first sonnet of the pair is Soul's Beauty, inscribed on the frame of Rossetti's other major 1860s stunner, Sibylla Palmifera. The two pictures and their two sonnets were conceived as a programmatic pair: the spiritual female ideal (Sibylla, the prophetic Sibyl) on one wall, and the physical female ideal (Lilith, the dangerous beauty) on the other.
The sonnet for Lady Lilith opens: "Of Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told / (The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,) / That, ere the snake's, her sweet tongue could deceive, / And her enchanted hair was the first gold." The sestet ends: "Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went / Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent / And round his heart one strangling golden hair." The poem reads the picture as a portrait of female beauty as trap — the hair specifically, the same long copper hair Lilith is calmly combing on the canvas, becomes a strangling agent in the sonnet's final image. The picture is therefore one part of a two-part argument about beauty: Lilith is its physical, dangerous, hair-as-noose form; Sibylla is its spiritual, prophetic, palm-as-emblem form. Rossetti's whole 1870s project of the stunner pictures sits inside this two-part frame.
Lady Lilith and the mourning of Elizabeth Siddal
Lady Lilith cannot be read in isolation from the picture Rossetti was painting alongside it in the late 1860s, Beata Beatrix, his memorial to his dead wife Elizabeth Siddal. The two pictures sit at opposite ends of the same emotional vocabulary. Beata Beatrix is grief, modelled by Rossetti's actual dead wife, organised around her hands open in her lap to receive a poppy from a messenger bird; Lady Lilith is sensuality, modelled by Rossetti's actual living mistress, organised around her hand on her own hair while she watches herself in a mirror. The poppy appears in both pictures — laudanum, the cause of Siddal's death, and the same flower behind Lilith's shoulder.
Read together, the two pictures are a coded autobiographical pair. Siddal, the dead wife, is staged as Beatrice in Dante's medieval poem; Cornforth (later Wilding), the living mistress, is staged as Lilith in medieval Jewish folklore. The poppy that killed Siddal becomes, in Lady Lilith, the same poppy growing in the wallpaper behind Lilith's combing hand — Rossetti is, in his own visual language, placing his ongoing affair with his housekeeper inside the same iconographic frame as the death of his wife. The painter's biography is absorbed into the picture's symbolic furniture. The picture is one of the moments at which Pre-Raphaelite painting, having begun in 1848 as a programme of photographic naturalism, has arrived twenty years later at full-blown personal symbolism — every leaf and flower a code, every object a token of the painter's own emotional life.
Lady Lilith's afterlife — the femme fatale enters Symbolism
Lady Lilith was bought directly from Rossetti's studio in 1873 by the Liverpool shipping magnate Frederick Leyland — the same patron who would commission the Peacock Room from Whistler later in the decade — and entered private American hands in the early twentieth century before being given to a Delaware collection in 1935. The picture's reputation since the 1880s has been continuous: it is one of the founding images of the late-Victorian femme fatale, the beautiful dangerous woman whose hair, gaze, or beauty entraps the male viewer. The same iconographic apparatus would be picked up in the 1890s by Symbolist painters across Europe — Gustave Moreau's Salomes, Khnopff's sphinxes, the early Klimt portraits — and would mutate into the early-modernist treatment of the female figure as both subject and threat.
The Lilith story itself, meanwhile, has had a more complicated late life. In late-twentieth-century feminist criticism Lilith was reread as a figure of female autonomy — the woman who refused to be subordinated to Adam, walked out of Eden, and accepted exile rather than submission. The first-wave Jewish feminist magazine Lilith, founded in 1976, took the name as a symbol of female refusal. The picture Rossetti painted in 1866-73, which had read Lilith as a dangerous beauty whose hair was a strangling noose, was rebuilt by twentieth-century readers as a portrait of female self-possession — a beautiful woman who looks at herself in a mirror, finds herself sufficient, and combs her own hair with the calm of someone who has refused. The same picture has carried both readings in different decades, which is one of the reasons it has survived.
Key takeaways
Rossetti's Lady Lilith (1866-73) is the Pre-Raphaelite stunner at its most concentrated — a half-length portrait of a beautiful woman combing her hair in front of a mirror, surrounded by Victorian symbolic flowers, named after a figure from medieval Jewish folklore.
Lilith was, in the post-Biblical tradition Rossetti drew on (the medieval Alphabet of Ben Sira), Adam's first wife — created at the same instant from the same earth, refused to submit, pronounced the secret name of God, flew to the wilderness, and became the mother of demons.
The first version of the picture was modelled by Fanny Cornforth, Rossetti's housekeeper, mistress, and primary 1860s sitter. The face was repainted in 1872-73 to use Alexa Wilding's features instead — the final canvas shows Wilding's face on Cornforth's body and hair.
Almost every object in the picture is symbolic: white poppies for sleep/laudanum, red roses for carnal love, foxgloves for insincere beauty, the small handheld mirror for vanitas, the tiny roundel of trees in the background as a glimpse of Eden Lilith was expelled from.
Rossetti wrote a sonnet to accompany the picture, titled "Body's Beauty," inscribed on its frame. The sonnet pairs with "Soul's Beauty," inscribed on the frame of Rossetti's other major 1860s stunner Sibylla Palmifera — the two pictures form a programmatic pair on physical versus spiritual female beauty.
Lady Lilith was painted alongside Beata Beatrix, Rossetti's memorial to his dead wife Elizabeth Siddal. The two pictures sit at opposite ends of the same emotional vocabulary — sensuality and mourning — and share the white poppy as a recurring symbol (laudanum killed Siddal).
Lady Lilith is one of the founding images of the late-Victorian femme fatale and was picked up directly by Symbolist painters across Europe in the 1890s — Moreau's Salomes, Khnopff's sphinxes, early Klimt. The 1970s feminist movement re-read the picture as a portrait of female autonomy, and both readings have survived.
Browse Pre-Raphaelite and Rossetti prints in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.
Comments