#Fanny Cornforth

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Fanny Cornforth (study for Fair Rosamund), 1861

[fawnvelveteen]

Photograph of Fanny Cornforth, 1863

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Looks like Fanny's getting in on the boop action, too.

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Lady Lillith (1866-68) - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Modelling in this piece is Fanny Cornthorth, who Rossetti had repeated affairs with. Naming the piece after Lilith is a reference to the sexual nature of their relationship.

Unlike Eve, Lilith was made from the same soil as Adam, not his rib. As a result, she refused to be subservient to Adam and ended up leaving him and the garden of Eden. She became a symbol of sexual promiscuity and sin.

“She represents the New Woman, free of male control, scourge of the patriarchal Victorian family,” - Virginia M. Allen, historian.

In some Jewish traditions, mothers tie red string to their newborns wrist to ward off lilith. In this depiction of Lilith, she has tied a red hibbon to her own left wrist as if embracing her own 'sinful' nature.

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A few of them were also artists of their own.

[littlequeenies]

Nicole Kidman pictured by Peggy Sirota for 1999 Esquire magazine.

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Pam Courson pictured by Raeanne Rubenstein at her Themis boutique in November 1969 for Show Magazine. first photo from 1970s home video (can you see the ressemblance of Pam first pic and Nicole last?)

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Beautiful Jane Asher in the 1960s and 1970s...

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Adding the 3 quintessential red haired Pre-Raphaelite muses: Alexa Wilding, Fanny Cornforth and Elizabeth Siddal.

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lindsay lohan photographed by ellen von unwerth for gq uk, august 2006

[fuzzysparrow]

Poet and Painter

Until 24th September 2023, Tate Britain is hosting an exhibition about the radical Rossetti family, focusing on their attitudes to art, love and lifestyles. Arguably, Dante Gabriel Rosetti is the most famous of the siblings, and his paintings make The Rossettis a remarkable exhibition. It has been over twenty years since Rossetti’s artwork has been on display in retrospective fashion, and it is a…

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[marejadilla]

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, (1828–1882), “Lady Lilith”, 1872, oil on Canvas. English poet, illustrator, painter, and translator. Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Symbolism.

“Lady Lilith is an oil on canvas painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti first painted between 1866 and 1868 using his lover Fanny Cornforth as a model, the work being altered in 1872 to show the face of Alexa Wilding. The painting is currently on display at the Delaware Art Museum”.

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dated circa 1860s

Fanny Cornforth Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) The Fitzwilliam Museum

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A little Manva Warhelm moodboard so I can clean up my blog...

Her face claim is Fanny Cornforth, famous for posing for the beautiful Bocca Baciata, but Rosetti was further inspired by, and indeed Manva is further inspired by, reimaginings of religious iconography (I am a complete art history novice so I'm not going to pretend to know much more than the surface level on this!)

There are SO many Mary Magdalen depictions (particularly the penitent Mary praying for forgiveness, which came into fashion around a time of protestant reform to remind people of the importance of Catholic repentance of sin, hehehe) that fit her aesthetic. Here are a handful of my favourites.

Clockwise from left: The Penitent Magdalen Carlo Cignani (c1685), Saint Magdalene by Guido Reni (c1602, honestly ALL of Reni's depictions are very her, I just love the soft face here), Penitent Magdalene, Bartolome Esteban Murillo (c1650), and Penitent Magdalene by the GOAT Artemesia Gentileschi (c1615)

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“Lady Lilith”

Painter: Dante Gabriel Rossetti Style: Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Aestheticism, Oil Year: 1866-73 Themes: Beauty, Youth, Mythology Notes: Lady Lilith is an oil painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti first painted in 1866–1868 using his mistress Fanny-Cornforth as the model, then altered in 1872–73 to show the face of Alexa Wilding. The subject is Lilith, who was, according to ancient Judaic myth, "the first wife of Adam" and is associated with the seduction of men and the murder of children. She is shown as a "powerful and evil temptress" and as "an iconic, Amazon-like female with long, flowing hair."

Rossetti overpainted Cornforth's face, perhaps at the suggestion of his client, shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland, who displayed the painting in his drawing room with five other Rossetti "stunners." After Leyland's death, the painting was purchased by Samuel Bancroft and Bancroft's estate donated it in 1935 to the Delaware Art Museum where it is now displayed.

The painting forms a pair with Sibylla Palmifera, painted 1866–1870, also with Wilding as the model.  Lady Lilithrepresents the body's beauty, according to Rossetti's sonnet inscribed on the frame.  Sibylla Palmifera represents the soul's beauty, according to the Rossetti sonnet on its frame.

A large 1867 replica of Lady Lilith, painted by Rossetti in watercolor, which shows the face of Cornforth, is now owned by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. It has a verse from Goethe’s Faust as translated by Shelley on a label attached by Rossetti to its frame:

"Beware of her fair hair, for she excells All women in the magic of her locks, And when she twines them round a young man's neck she will not ever set him free again."

More: Lady Lilith

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Bocca Baciata (1859) by Rossetti, modelled by Fanny Cornforth (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Lady Lilith.” This painting was supposed to represent the body’s beauty, as opposed to his painting “Sybilla Palmifera,” representing the soul’s beauty. From the link:

DGR's remarks to his friend Hake (21 April 1870) are fundamental: “The picture is called Lady Lilith by rights (only I thought this would present a difficulty in print without paint to explain it,) and represents a ‘Modern Lilith’ combing out her abundant golden hair and gazing on herself in the glass with that self-absorption by whose strange fascination such natures draw others within their own circle.” (Fredeman, Correspondence 70.110)

Allen's excellent study of DGR's treatment of the Lilith theme draws attention to the importance of the hair iconography—in particular to the relation DGR draws between hair as a sign of erotic power and as a figure of entrapment.

DGR poses Lilith in a manner strongly reminiscent of his 1870 picture Woman with a Fan , a portrait of Fanny Cornforth.

The floral paraphernalia include a semi-coronal of white roses, which appear to signify cold sensuous love (according to legend, roses gained their red coloring only when Eve was created, at which point the rose blushed at the sight of her beauty); a crown of poppies on Lilith's lap (signifying sleep and forgetfulness); and a spray of foxglove on the bureau (signifying insincerity).

... Allen calls attention to the contemporary relation between the figure of the femme fatale and the Women's Emancipation Movement in England. More specifically, she notes that among DGR's papers was a letter to the editor of the Athenaeum dated November 1869 in which the author, Ponsonby A. Lyons, makes the following observation: “Lilith, about whom you ask for information, was the first strong-minded woman and the original advocate of women's rights” (WMR, Rossetti Papers 1862 to 1870, 483).

[ubu507]

Fanny Cornforth I Karen Jones (active 2010) Beecroft Art Gallery

[fumblingmusings]

Gonna be honest i always ignored himura's nyo!England - mines built like a boxer (think nicola adams) and has wild curly hair that she's only reeaaly learned to take care of in the 2010's. And of course she has the eyebrows. I mean if England gets to be a scrapy scruffy gremlin child, why shouldn't she?

[For those without context Nicola Adams is an retired, undefeated, darling of the UK, British boxer who looks like this:]

You know anon I was just reading about female Georgian pugilists (can't believe it was a legit thing but oh my gosh they really went for it) the other day and I can see what you mean!!!

This painting by John Collet is less about actual pugilists and more about a brothel worker getting into a fight with another lady and there's all kinds of shenanigans in the background with some dude getting his pocket picked and the kids are pinching that woman's muff and the bloke pulling up the poorer woman has hands somewhere they should not be and I think people are betting in the background and...

Georgian Britain... good gosh. It's almost funny how the Victorians looked back at the previous century and recoiled in horror. The utter lack of morals my goodness!

I agree with curly hair. I think it would be lovely if all the Anglo-Celt kids should have curly hair and they all looked like they just got dragged through a hedge backwards. Which they probably have at one point or another after falling off a horse or something.

Personally I'm a big fan of making female England a bit of a operatic Victorian waif - albeit one with a bit more agency who doesn't go gently into that good night a la Mimì in La Bohème...

But the Pre-Raphaelite models like Annie Miller, Fanny Cornforth/Sarah Cox, Jane Morris, Mary Emma Jones and Alexa Wildling. They're England. At least to me. Not very soft, a little hollow, but beauties all of them.

Like Annie Miller was once described by Ford Madox Brown as “looking thinner and more deathlike and more beautiful and more ragged than ever” which is such a whiplash of a compliment/negging, but that's really what I like to picture a female England as.

Like in her good years (like I suppose anytime pre 1645 and post 1995 really) absolutely she's a tiny tank who budges for no-one but in - ironically - her most powerful years she is also at her most... emaciated.

Ah! Thank you for your thoughts. Excuse mine.