Elizabeth (Lizzie) Siddal is probably the most famous of the 'stunners' who inspired the Pre-Raphaelites and moulded their ideal of female beauty. In 1849 she was working as a milliner's assistant in Cranbourne Alley, Leicester Square where she was 'discovered' by Walter Deverell, a young, good-looking associate of the recently founded Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and asked to model for the figure of Viola in the picture he was currently painting, Twelfth Night (formerly Forbes Collection, sold Christie's, London, 19 February 2003, lot 36). Rossetti was also sitting for the picture, taking the part of the jester Feste, and it was in Deverell's studio that he and Lizzie met.
By the early 1850s she would only sit for Rossetti, and the two were engaged. The relationship was complicated and tumultuous, but it led to around sixty drawings of Lizzie by Rosetti, which are some of his most intimate and tender and regarded as some of his greatest achievements. A few of the drawings are studies for paintings, but by far the majority were made for their own sake and stand as independent works of art. Some are carefully considered head studies, some indicate her setting in considerable detail, but most are impromptu sketches recording some pose that had caught the artist's imagination as she reclined wearily in her chair, sat at her easel, read a book, or, in one instance, listlessly cut a pattern from a strip of paper.