The grave and the sad last years of Fanny Cornforth, the dazzling model and mistress of the pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, have finally been discovered. Her lovely face and mass of red hair were immortalised in scores of his paintings – but she ended suffering from dementia and penniless in the Sussex county asylum, and was buried in a common grave in 1909.
A blue plaque on the modest house at Steyning, West Sussex where she was born Sarah Cox in 1835, a blacksmith’s daughter, still states “date and place of death unknown”. However her biographer, art historian Kirsty Stonell Walker, traced her through the records of the former Graylingwell Hospital in Chichester, now stored at the West Sussex records office, and has found and laid a bunch of flowers on her unmarked grave.
Wendy Walker, the county archivist, said the publication by the National Archives of the indexes of the Victorian Lunacy Commission and 20th-century Board of Control records provided the clue to Cornforth’s fate, and brought Stonell Walker to the West Sussex records office.
“Fanny is the patron saint of overlooked women,” Stonell Walker said. “She is in the background of so many stories about other people, and she seemed finally to have vanished without trace into the shadows. But she had her good times, and she had her spirit.”
A photograph stored with her hospital file recorded her appearance in 1907, when she had been placed in a workhouse near Chichester by her comparatively well-off sister-in-law, and then moved to the asylum as her mental health declined.
She is wearing a black dress with a crooked white lace collar, and in Stonell Walker’s words, looks “both terrified and belligerent”.
“She looks like she wants to lamp you, like she’ll take you out at any moment,” Stonell Walker said. “I rather like it.”
The records – rediscovered through a Heritage Lottery-backed community history project about the institution which became the Graylingwell Hospital and closed in 2001 – describe Cornforth as stout but physically healthy apart from being very deaf. She had brown-grey hair, grey-green eyes, and a full set of dentures. She blamed her mental state on being taken to the workhouse “against her will”, but the report found “senile mania, confusion, weak-mindedness and an inability to sustain a rational conversation, a poor memory and sleeplessness.” Her health worsened after a fall, and she died of pneumonia. She was buried in a common grave in Chichester district cemetery.
Christopher Whittick, who wrote on her life in the Dictionary of National Biography intends to now update the entry.
“It is a very sad story, but the hospital was not a terrible place, it actually had a very progressive approach towards mental illness,” said Stonell Walker. “She was buried with a few other people, but not exactly in a pauper’s grave.”
Like many of the young women the pre-Raphaelite painters dubbed “stunners”, picked up as models and often mistresses and occasionally wives, Cornforth came from a working-class background. Jane Morris, an ostler’s daughter, meekly consented to being educated to make her fit to become the wife of William Morris, but Cornforth was outspoken and strong willed, and therefore regarded as incurably vulgar by most of the artists.
She was the model for major Rossetti works including Aurelia (Fazio’s Mistress), Bocca Baciata (the kissed mouth, from a story by Bocaccio) and The Blue Bower, which shows her against a sumptuous background of oriental tiles. She also suffered the mortification of posing for Rossetti’s sexiest painting, Venus Verticordia, only to see her face replaced with that of a later favourite, Alexa Wilding.
She became Rossetti’s housekeeper after she put on weight and he lost interest in her sexually – cruelly dubbing her “the elephant” – but was turned out of the house when he became ill and his middle-class family reclaimed him before his death in 1882. She got her own back in a series of sales of paintings and other memorabilia which she had “acquired” during her time in the household. Many of the treasures, which she kept in a store known as “the elephant hole”, are now in major museum collections, including the Delaware Art Museum.
“She has often been described as an illiterate Cockney prostitute – none of which was true,” Stonell Walker said. “She was a model, and a woman who had to work hard all her life to keep herself, with very little help from anyone else.”
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion