Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1828-1882

Previously unrecorded, this portrait drawing of Annie Miller appears to date from the about 1860. The model is identified by the treatment of her broad forehead and prominent brow, and her long straight nose and strong chin. The present study may be compared most directly with Rossetti’s portrait of Annie facing to the right, and which is now in Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery (Virginia Surtees, Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1828-1882 – The Paintings and Drawings – A Catalogue Raisonné, two volumes, Oxford, 1971, I, p.173, cat. no.355). Among other portrait drawings of Annie Miller by Rossetti is one showing her head and shoulders turned to the left (Surtees, ibid., I, p.173, cat. no.354; II, pl.404), and another with her head upturned and looking to the right (Surtees, ibid., I, p.234, appendix 12), although neither corresponds closely in position or treatment to the present drawing. Rossetti seems to have admired Annie Miller's serene and self-confident manner, and represented her as a woman of distinct, perhaps even wilful, personality. Rossetti’s painting Helen of Troy (Hamburger Kunsthalle), completed in 1863 but dependent on earlier drawings, shows her as having blue eyes and fair hair, and as being extraordinarily beautiful.

Annie Miller was a woman of humble origins having spent her childhood in a Chelsea slum. Holman Hunt met her in the spring of 1850, when she was fifteen or so, and employed her as a model in his painting The Awakening Conscience (Tate), of 1853-4. Hunt thought of her as a future wife, and sought to prepare her for a higher social position. When, early in 1854, Hunt left for the Middle East, he gave F.G. Stephens a list of names of artists for whom he was happy that Annie should model. George Price Boyce drew her in February 1854, apparently without Hunt's permission, and at about the same time she first sat to Rossetti – certainly the person Hunt most expressly wished she should not pose for. Rossetti made such a cult of her that she became a familiar and much admired figure of his circle, as was testified by Ford Madox Brown in 1856: ‘Gabriel has let her sit to others not in [Holman Hunt’s approved] list & taken her out to dine at Bertolini’s & to Cremorn[e] where she danced with Boyce … They all seem mad about Annie Millar [sic] & poor Hunt has had a fever about it’ (The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, edited by Virginia Surtees, New Haven, 1981, p.181). 

In 1858 Holman Hunt confronted Boyce with the request that he should give up his 1854 drawing of Annie, as Boyce explained in his diary because Hunt ‘wished to destroy as far as was possible all traces of her former occupation, viz, that of sitting to certain artists’ (The Diaries of George Price Boyce, edited by Virginia Surtees, Norwich, 1980, p.20). Boyce reluctantly released his own drawing of Annie to Hunt, but the campaign to suppress images of her more generally was hopeless, as Annie herself was happy to allow artists to draw and paint her and welcomed their attentions. In 1859 Hunt broke off his engagement with her, on the grounds that ‘he could not get her to do what he wanted to make her a desirable wife to him, nor to wean herself from old objectionable habits’ (quoted The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, edited by William E. Fredeman, II, p.290, n1).

Rossetti continued to use Annie as a model at least until the spring of 1860, but she seems to have become a worry to those who knew her ‘by reason of the distraction of her mind and heart’, as Boyce put it (The Diaries of George Price Boyce, op. cit., p.28). Annie was then flaunting an affair with Lord Ranelagh, while perhaps also resorting to prostitution and blackmail. Her name occurs on one last occasion in the Pre-Raphaelite literature, when Boyce observed her at the International Exhibition in June 1862: ‘Saw Annie Miller there looking as handsome as ever, walking with a young man, rather a swell’ (Ibid., p.35). The following year, Annie married a Captain Thompson, and permanently passed out of the Pre-Raphaelite circle.

CSN