Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Bad Photographs

Abstract

Victorian photography served as an elegiac medium for Dante Gabriel Rossetti to mourn his wife, Elizabeth Siddal. This essay explores Rossetti’s anxieties about photography that led him both to destroy portrait photographs of Siddal and to preserve her artwork in a photographic album that he created after her death. To understand the artist’s conflicted use of the medium, this essay turns to Rossetti’s elegiac “Willowwood” sonnets from The House of Life (1870), which present a metaphor for the concealment and exposure of the lost beloved, demonstrated by an overpainted photograph of Siddal.

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