From Muses into Makers – the Artists, Elizabeth Siddal and Victorine Meurent Reloaded

The history of art is replete with female muses – muses, who in notable cases, are artists, but whose agentive and creative visibility remains eclipsed or even undone by their constructs as ‘muse’ and in their relations to constructs of canonicity. This article sheds new light on two of the most arguably celebrated muses of key ‘makers’ of modern art – Elizabeth Siddal, in connection with Dante-Gabriel Rossetti, and Victorine Meurent with Edouard Manet. However, pivotal is to challenge cultural and canonical perspectives on these muse-artist interactions, to discover and resituate two Muses who speak back to power – muses, whose neglected significance as artists and as networkers, opens new insights into their artistic uses of the uncanny, temporal alterity and the performative as key, yet hidden modalities of creative challenge, vision and new agencies of ‘modernity’. Discussion will consider first, Elizabeth’s Siddal pivotal role within – and beyond, anthologized labels of ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’. Building on recent researchy and curatorial interest in Siddal’s creative output (2022; 2023), a key focus is to explore Siddal’s ‘Gothic’ gaze in works such as The Haunted Wood (1856) and St Agnes’ Eve (c.1850) concerned with ‘hauntings’ and revelatory nature as a highly distinct response to and re-imagining of the medieval world-vision developed by Rossetti and his immediate contemporaries: a vision that situates female agency as the mediator of liminality and the culturally subversive. Turning to Victorine Meurent, the article goes on to consider how in Meurent’s case (whose visibility as an artist remains problematic) – liminality, via her performative practices of staging her muse-artist identities – reveals her occulted significance in shaping a vision and a ‘gaze’, held to Manet’s creation, but is actually central to this. Indeed, discussion will bring new research findings to examine Meurent’s staged images, working across gender identities, in Manet’s Victorine Meurent in Costume of a Toreador (1862) and related works, alongside the few known paintings by Meurent, notably her 1876 Self-Portrait and Palm Sunday (1880), to illuminate Meurent’s potent uses of uncanny masking/unmasking to pose provocative questions of history-making, image ownership and its agency. The conclusions propose via these muses who talk back, that the frames through which we understand the agentive role of women as both muses and artists, still need radical rethinking.