Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1867
The artist identified the subject on a label attached to the original 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." Here, as in Rosetti's other drawings and paintings of Lady Lilith, the artist's mistress, Fanny Cornforth, served as the model.
Lilith's own appearance in this painting establishes her as "the embodiment of carnal loveliness"
A beautiful woman, splendidly and voluptuously formed, is leaning back on a couch combing her long fair hair, while with cold dispassionateness she surveys her features in a hand mirror. . . She herself was a serpent first, and knows the gift of fascination. Bowered in roses, robed in white flowing draperies that slip and reveal the swelling contour of her bust and shoulders, no painter has ever captured like this the elemental power of carnal loveliness.
What is perhaps most visually striking about the picture is Lilith's clothing, "clothes that look as if they are soon to be removed". Her body, barely able to be contained by the clothing, invites the viewer to read Lilith as sensual and beautiful.
It is not only the nearly removed nature of Lilith's attire that draws attention to her image as a sexualized being. What is absent from the picture is just as important. Lilith's sexual availability is more prominently signaled by "the absence of corsetry, tight-lacing, and other marks of bourgeois moral rectitude" the corset is "an ever-present monitor individually bidding its wearer to exercise self-restraint: it is evidence of a well- disciplined mind and well-regulated feelings" Her hair loose and corset absent, this Lilith is assuredly a symbol of open sexuality.
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