Artist’s Model. One of the regular models employed by the English painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, together with the better-known Elizabeth Siddall, Jane Morris, and Fanny Cornforth. Though Alexa (who was commonly known as Alice) was obliged to go to work at a young age, she was, unlike Cornforth and many other working-class girls, literate. Around 1865 the aspiring actress was working, probably as a dressmaker, when Rossetti spotted her in the Strand, London. Wilding had ivory skin, elegant features – and “golden” auburn hair, the very color idealized by the Victorians. She became Rossetti’s model, sitting for his paintings Monna Vanna, Regina Cordium, La Ghirlandata, La Bella Mano, and Veronica Veronese, among others. Wilding, who never married, enjoyed a long and apparently Platonic friendship with Rossetti; she outlived him, dying of peritonitis and exhaustion, brought on by a splenic tumor, in 1884. The paintings featuring her can be seen in various museums in England and the United States.
Artist’s Model. One of the regular models employed by the English painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, together with the better-known Elizabeth Siddall, Jane Morris, and Fanny Cornforth. Though Alexa (who was commonly known as Alice) was obliged to go to work at a young age, she was, unlike Cornforth and many other working-class girls, literate. Around 1865 the aspiring actress was working, probably as a dressmaker, when Rossetti spotted her in the Strand, London. Wilding had ivory skin, elegant features – and “golden” auburn hair, the very color idealized by the Victorians. She became Rossetti’s model, sitting for his paintings Monna Vanna, Regina Cordium, La Ghirlandata, La Bella Mano, and Veronica Veronese, among others. Wilding, who never married, enjoyed a long and apparently Platonic friendship with Rossetti; she outlived him, dying of peritonitis and exhaustion, brought on by a splenic tumor, in 1884. The paintings featuring her can be seen in various museums in England and the United States.
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