Alexa Wilding model

Alexa Wilding is one of the young women who worked as an artist’s model for the Pre Raphaelite painters, mainly for Rossetti.   She was born to a working class family but very little is known of her... She was a very beautiful girl with the red gold hair that many of the painters liked... perhaps because it was part of an unconventional offbeat beauty which they appreciated.

She was born as Alice Wilding in Surrey around 1847 but little is known of her family.  She lived in London with relatives in the 1860s and was working as a dressmaker when she met Rossetti.  This was a   job that was hard work and badly paid, usually but it was a job with some perks.  It was sedentary work and sometimes gave girls a chance to mix with upper and middle class people.  Moralists however often disapproved.  They feared that these girls could be corrupted by these encounters with men who were better off than they were.  Mrs Gaskell’s heroine of her novel Ruth was working in a dressmaker’s when she met the man who seduced her...

Rossetti saw Alexa walking down the Strand and was struck but her beauty.  Some of the artist’s models’ had romantic or sexual relationships with the painters they worked for – however it appears that Alexa, as she called herself, did not.

Rossetti asked her to sit for him and she agreed but did not turn up, possibly because she was dubious about his motives for giving her a job.  She clearly did not want to become a mistress or prostitute.   A few weeks later, Rossetti saw her again and hurried to speak to her, persuading her to come and sit for him and paying her a small weekly fee so that she would not be working for anyone else…  He had another model Fanny Cornforth who was a more earthy voluptuous type of girl and who did become his mistress…

But Alexa’s more “ladylike” and ethereal beauty appealed to him and to some of his patrons..And he used her to re paint some pictures that he had started to work on with Fanny as model.. After this second meeting, she did start to work for him steadily....

She seems to have been a placid rather quiet girl who did not interact much with her artist. But he found her hard working and went on working with her.  As time passed Rossetti’s health declined and he was unable to work.  His wife Elizabeth Siddall had died and he went back to his affair with Fanny Cornforth, keeping her in his house as his housekeeper and mistress.  But when he became sicker, his relatives asked  Fanny to leave.  

Alexa sat for many paintings including the Bower Meadow, Lady Lilith and Venus Verticordia.  When he died, in 1882, Alexa made an effort to visit his grave to place a wreath…. perhaps saddened by his long decline in health, caused by depression and drug abuse.

In 1881 Alexa was known to be living in a house in Kensington, as a landlady.  She also had two children, but nothing is known of whom their father was or if she was married… Rossetti seems to have helped her out financially to achieve a certain independence..

A few years after his death, she became ill and died of a tumour on the spleen at the age of 37 or so  in 1884.  She does not appear to have worked for other artists and her life  was quite a short one.  However she did acquire a home and a certain degree of respectable independence… and the fame of being a beauty and model for a well-known and successful artist.