The Lady-Killers Club: How Pre-Raphaelite Women Just Hijacked the Male Gaze

 

Il Dolce Far Niente, William Holman Hunt, 1866, Oil on canvas 

The Scene

Picture London, 1851: coal fog thick enough to butter toast, gin palaces rattling with gossip, and seven art-school dropouts swearing to paint “truth to nature.” They call themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, because half a pint of manifesto always tastes better with a secret handshake. What nobody wrote on the pub-napkin charter: the movement would be powered—financially, physically, imaginatively—by women. And not just any women, but working-class drapers, Caribbean immigrants, and one red-haired aspiring poet who nearly froze to death in a bathtub for the sake of a masterpiece. 

Enter, Ophelia

Elizabeth Siddal is the cover girl you know even if you can’t spell Pre-Raphaelite. Millais bunged her in a tub, the oil lamps sputtered out, and the water went glacial. She caught pneumonia; he caught raves at the Royal Academy. Her father demanded damages, Millais low-balled him, and history filed Siddal under tragic muse instead of under first woman in the circle to exhibit her own canvases. It’s the art-world equivalent of confusing Bond with the Aston Martin. 

The Jamaican in the Parlour

Then there’s Fanny Eaton—born in Kingston, shipped to Hackney, immortalised everywhere, credited nowhere. Rossetti, Solomon, Burne-Jones: all borrowed her high cheekbones for their biblical exotica, re-casting a Black Londoner as “Egyptian princess” one minute, “Moses’ mum” the next. Eaton pocketed fifteen shillings a sitting—solid money if you’re making beds in Bloomsbury—but the real dividend was agency: she negotiated hours, fabrics, even how dark the studio drapes would fall across her skin. 

When the Ladies Got the Labels

Fast-forward to 2019. The National Portrait Gallery’s “Pre-Raphaelite Sisters” drops twelve women onto center stage—painters, poets, embroiderers, deal-brokers—no Brothers required. Critiques of the male gaze? Check. Velvet-drenched Instagram opps? Double check. But the real flex is institutional: wall texts now quote a model’s day rate alongside the painter’s price tag, reminding every bearded hipster in the foyer that beauty has always been a gig economy. 

Smells Like Team Spirit

The movement didn’t stop at looks; it went for the nose. The Barber Institute’s upcoming show, “Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites,” funnels jasmine, patchouli, and coal-sweat straight through the HVAC so visitors can sniff the contradictions: chastity lilies on one canvas, opium incense on the next. A sensory slap that says, Yes, dear viewer, Victorian virtue came with a side of narcotic haze. 

Toxic Chic

Speaking of haze, those luminous greens? Arsenic. Scheele’s Green pigment gave every ivy vine its lethal pop—great for gallery walls, lousy for the female assistants grinding the powder. Add the Afghan lapis lazuli in Millais’s blues and the Indian indigo in Rossetti’s silks, and every swooning damsel doubles as a supply-chain horror story. If the walls could talk, they’d cough. 

Why It Still Hits

The Brotherhood preached medieval romance; their sisters practised modern hustle. Today’s feminist scholars aren’t just counting how many women got painted—they’re chasing shipping receipts, perfume formulas, and pigment recipes to map who paid what price for the luscious myth. The result? A movement that looks less like a fairytale and more like the prototype for every influencer collab you’ve ever liked: aesthetics, labour, and ownership locked in a perpetual love triangle. 

The Take-Home, Gentleman

Next time you spot Ophelia on a museum tote, remember the woman in the tub sent a medical bill. Clock Fanny Eaton’s gaze and ask yourself who still isn’t tagged in the group shot. And if you’re spritzing Oud Noir before date night, thank the Barber Institute for reminding you that scent, like art, is never neutral.

Because real style—the kind Esquire raises a Negroni to—isn’t just how good something looks under gallery lights. It’s knowing who lit the lamp, who kept it burning, and who got pneumonia when the flame went out.