Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Pre-Raphaelites: Art & Sexual Liberation

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

The Pre-Raphaelites: Art & Sexual LiberationIf there’s one thing we like to embrace on this podcast, it’s a slice of controversy. Which is why today’s topic of the Pre-Raphaelites movement is such a joy to explore: this was the swinging 60s of the Victorian era. A time when a group of artists, including Dante Rossetti and John Millais, refused to conform to the artistic norms at the time, and instead embraced sexuality and nature in a style that was more luscious and medieval than modern. What exactly did they stand for? Who were the women that inspired them? And why did the establishment’s feathers become so ruffled? Today, Kate is Betwixt the Sheets with legendary art historian Jan Marsh to find out. Senior producer: Charlotte Long. Producer: Sophie Gee. Mixed by Stuart Beckwith. We’re trying to understand our audience a bit better. You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. My lovely bitwifters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here once more as I always am from now until forevermore, or at least until we get cancelled, with your fair do's warning. Fair do's, everybody. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults in an adulty way, and you should be an adult too,

surrounded by other adults in a completely adult environment. And if you're not, then you need to just turn this off right now. If you have a sensitive disposition, I don't know why you're listening to this, but you need to turn it off. Actually, I don't think that we're getting that naughty today. I think we've been more shocking than this one. We're talking about the women of the pre-Raphaelite art movement, the ones that inspired the paintings, and the ones that were doing a fair old bit of painting themselves. So we're not super shocking, but obviously, you know the deal by now.

we're going to be wandering into some vaguely scandalous territory. I'll be swearing and there probably will be some shocking stuff coming your way that I've just forgotten was in there. And with all of that in mind, betwixters, if you're still with me, then I am ready to do this if you are. One of the things that you might not know about me, and I know that I do definitely overshare on this podcast, I'm going to do it again right now, is that I used to be a life model. For years when I was funding my way through university, I would pose in the nip in front of various art groups around the north of England. Proper art groups as well, not just, you know, random people said they were painters and decorators, actual artists, ranging from A-level students,

university students, through to hobbyists and little art groups that like to do it on the side. And I had a lot of fun doing it. And the reason that I did it is because I thought it would be easy money. I'll pay you 20 quid, you sit still, jobs are gooden. But one of the things that I learned really quickly, and anyone who has been a life model closed or, otherwise, we'll empathise with this one, is it's not easy money. No, betwixters, it is not easy money. You will find out, around about five minutes into your first pose, it hurts. It really hurts.

Joint start to seize up. Things start to go numb. Pins and needles are all over your body. And the pain of it, when you're doing a long pose, half an hour to an hour, can be excruciating. Anything more than just lying flat on your back on a mattress on the floor is hard work when it comes to being a model. But one of the things that experience has left me with is an ongoing admiration for the models that are featured in the great art of today. We often forget about them, but the people in the paintings would have been models, who really did have to hold that pose. And I guess this is

why I empathised with the women who sat before the artists that we're talking about today, the pre-raphalites. Would I have liked to have sat for the pre-raphalites? I don't know. One thing that you do need if you've been a a life model today is a sense of professionalism. And they weren't always that. They were a bunch of scallywags. They were known for getting into trouble. They courted controversy. And one of their models caught pneumonia while posing for them. So I think I'd probably give them a swerve. But I would have liked to have had a pint with them. Absolutely. Because these were artists who really changed what was going on. It was an artistic movement that had sexual liberation and sensuality at its very heart. And I'm all about that. But not about pneumonia.

The women in their paintings are languid and sensuous with sultry expressions, and they tend to be recreating some mythological scene with flowing hair and rosy lip. You'll know them when you see them. And although the women in their paintings are very, very beautiful, one of their main doctrines was to quote, to produce thoroughly good pictures. And they absolutely did. Let's delve betwixt the sheets to explore this vital artistic movement

and the women at the heart of it. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect coppents of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel for them for them.

Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kailista. Now, we absolutely love a little bit of, controversy on this podcast, so it feels fitting that we are heading back to Victorian London to find out all about a bunch of controversialists, the pre-Raphaelites, the pre-Raphaelite movement, artists that set the world alight in the 19th century. What were they doing that was so shocking? And to answer that question, and many others, we are joined by legendary art historian Jan Marsh.

If you have ever read anything about the pre-Raphylites or been to see an exhibition on the pre-raphalites, it's going to have been written by, curated by or influenced by Jan. She is the OG of pre-Raphaelite history. And she's going to help us understand who were the main players of this movement. What was the story of the women who sat for them? And just what were they doing to ruffle so many feathers in the establishment? Easles and oils at the ready betwixtors. Let's do this. Welcome to Betwixtor Sheets. I am only talking to Jan Marsh. How are he

you. I'm fine. Thank you. Nice to meet you. It is amazing to meet you, Jan, because anyone who's ever studied anything about the pre-Rathlites will know your name. You have written so many books, edited so many collections of letters, curated exhibitions, still curating exhibitions, chief of the William Morris Society. You have dedicated your whole life to this group of artists. So it seems. I mean, it's amazing. My first question is, do you remember what it was about this group of artists, like way back in the midst of time that made you go, ooh, they are interesting.

I want to know more about them. Well, I first got interested in them because of the way back when, when there was an interest in the wives of artists in their own right, I was already interested in writing and researching in the William Morris Circle, and I thought to myself that Jane Morris would make a good subject for researching how it felt to be the wife of a famous artist, cross, or whatever. So I proposed this to a publisher, a biography of Jane Morris, and it went down very ill. So thinking on my feet, I said, well, but about a book about all the pre-raphalite models?

Oh, yes, they said. So that was the start of it, and that was less the painting. I'm not actually a great Victorian art, a fan of Victorian art, personally. The people are so interesting and they're interaction and there's so much material there and every time you ask something about it, it makes you want to discover something more. That is so true. I'm actually quite surprised to hear you say that you're not a fan of Victorian art. That's really interesting because I thought that this passion would have come out like a real love of the art itself,

but it was more the people that were producing it. It was, and the fact that their stories had not been properly told me. Then turned out to be a huge amount of material in the letters and diaries as well as in the paintings. Don't get me wrong, the paintings are very, very interesting. It's just the aesthetic, it's not one that I really like. We should probably start by saying, who were the pre-Raphaelites? Because thinking about their aesthetic is today it could,

I don't even want to say it, but it could perhaps be viewed as a little bit Tui today. Everyone will be familiar with it if you see it. It's the luscious redheads and kind of lots of King Arthur paintings and some of them can be a bit chocolate boxy. That sounds really mean. If you don't know who the pre-raph lights are and you Google them and you see the art, you'll go, oh, I know who these people are. But who were they, Jan? What was this movement? What was the Brotherhood who started it? It was launched at the very end of 1848 by some art students in London. The contemporary equivalent of the young British artists of Damian Hurst and Tracy Eming generation, they were very ambitious and they wanted to make a mark. So they

rubbish the previous generation and all their teachers and the whole kind of aesthetic that they've been trained to follow and to make the splash. And of course, like the young British artists, it was quite shocking. But as Christina Rossetti remark, she was a poet and associated with the pre-up rights. Even being laughed at is better than being ignored. Oh, I like that. She was a clever bunny, wasn't she? Christina. They were very young, weren't they? The Brotherhood, the original artist who started this. Babies, really. Yes, but they were very, as it were, very energetic and ambitious. And there were seven of them in the group originally. It was a bit of a made-up idea about a secret society. It wasn't really like that. And it didn't last very long. But it was that kind of

impulse that we will do something and will shock our elders. So there were three major members of it. One was Dante Gabriel Rosetti, who is still very well known and whose great exhibition that would take currently on. And he had the most energy, the most ideas, most originality of the more. Then there was William Holman Hunt, who went on to have a career, mainly as a religious painter. You know, his painting of Christ knocking at the door, holding the lantern. And of course, the third major figure was John Everett Milley, who was the best, most technically accomplished artist. He could basically paint whatever he'd like, whatever he'd caught of. And his most world-famous painting is the drowning Ophelia in a

tape collection. Ophelia from Hamlet, drowning in the river in her sort of ball gown. And that remains It's a sort of key image of early pre-Rapoliticism. And it's very romantic. It's a fantasy painting in many ways. And that's what I think you were getting at, that this work appeals to the idea of fantasy. Not exactly Game of Thrones, but, you know. They would have loved Game of Thrones.

Why did they call themselves the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood? Why did they want to be pre-Raphael? And that's not the Ninja Turtle, the artist. What was that about? The whole of art training and art practice from the Renaissance onwards, founded on the basis that Raphael, Renaissance artist, was the pinnacle of perfection. Everything after that was a bit of a decline.

This continued through the art schools and academies of Europe right the way through to the 19th century. So what was being taught was Be Like Raphael? Yes. Oh, he was very good. Yes. Anyway, their idea was that they should return, the art should return to the naivety of the late medieval,

with the saints and the gilded backgrounds, and to recover that naivety, that simplicity, that faith that they saw in the late medieval period. Somebody said, oh, you like the pre-Raphaelites, do you? That is fascinating. So the pre-Raphaelite brothers, or the Italian primitives, they came along and they decided that it's not, not Raphael that we don't like. It's this insistence on doing it only this way. So what did they

do with their art that was so radically different? Because I think we can be desensitized to what's radical art today, because radical art to us is that it's like Tracy Emin's bed, or it's like a head made of blood or a light switch that goes on. That's how radical arts got. So we can lose when we look at the pre-Raphaelites that it was radical. What was it that they did that really shocked everyone that was so different from what Raphael had been doing. Well, for one thing, they used much more outline, much more drawing rather than modeling and making the illusion of volume. So they drew very flatly. They used some primary colors. Ruskin said he was fed up of all these brown pictures.

They're very vivid, aren't they? They're very vivid and they're very colourful. And that came partly out of the fact that new paint colours were available. Of course. The other important thing is that they treated these traditional subjects in a very irreverent way so that Millet, for example, took the childhood of Christ in the carpenters shop

and drew and painted it as if it was a real carpenters shop, not an idealised version of that and really challenging people's perceptions of what art should be. And the reaction to this, again, it's strange when you look at it now because the paintings just look so beautiful and lush and amazing. And how could anyone object to it? But when Millay exhibited Christ in the carpenter's shop, Charles Dickens went to see it and he wrote a piece absolutely shredding it,

didn't it? He picked on the fact that Christ has got red hair and he's got dirty feet and that the Virgin Mary is too skinny and that he absolutely went for it. He hated that painting. Did they have supporters? Because it can't have just been everybody going around, and this is horrendous. I think also they softened their approach, in fact.

Now the term pre-raphalite encompasses all this sort of fantasy, pretty pictures, lovely ladies. We should talk about the ladies, shouldn't we? We should, yes. Because that's one area of your expertise in research was the women in these men's lives and in their paintings. And it seems quite inextricable from the art now itself. And when you think of pre-Raphylites, you're often thinking of language. women in pools and red hair and luscious lips.

But who were these women in their lives and how much of an influence did they have over the art? Were they just models pouting and being drawn? Or were they more integral than that? Well, one of the other principles of the original pre-refact brotherhood was that the figures in the painting should be drawn from real life and not from idealised statuary or previous... It was paintings.

So that meant having real-life models. It's a bit like casting actors, actually. They wanted models who fit the story, who could enact the story that they were telling on campus. So the models were chosen from anywhere and everywhere. And so some of that was friends and relations of the artists. Because the other thing was they didn't have very much money, so they didn't want to pay literally.

There was a notion they were paid a shilling an hour, but it's more like they were paid a couple of shillings for a session, which would be three hours, you know, so that would be once or twice a week. It wasn't a sort of constant employment. And it's my contention that the young women who were chosen in that way actually were active participant. They seized the opportunity. It was a good deal better posing for a gentleman and painter, who were scrubbing doorsteps, which many of the young women were destined to do for half their lives. I'll be back with Jan and the pre-Raphylites after the short break.

On Gone Medieval from History Hit, we set out to solve the biggest mysteries of the medieval age. So many of these travellers who went out looking for Presta John, what did they think they were hearing? Using science to identify our buried ancestors. Genetic signatures found in present day Ashkenazi Jewish populations was shared by the genetic ancestries we found in these individuals. And reveal the answers to centuries-old riddles.

I stand up straight in a bed. I'm hairy at my base, and I make the ladies cry. The solution is an onion. I'm Matt Lewis, and every Tuesday and Friday you can join me to travel the medieval world in search of the stories you haven't heard and to get under the skins of the ones you have. Gone medieval from history hit. Twice a week, every week. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify. or wherever you get your podcasts. Really interesting this, because for many years,

I worked as a life model to earn extra money, and it's a very strange process. It's actually a lot harder than you think it would be. Holding any pose for any length of time is actually, it's really difficult. But the status of the life models at this time, was there a difference in the status between nude models who would be employed by the Academy or things like that

and the women that were modelling for the pre-Raphafalites? Because it was my understanding there was quite a lot of shame attached with being a model, that it was sort of conflated with being an actress or being a harlot. Have I got that wrong? Well, it was. Most of the models in the Victorian era posed clothes. There we go, you see.

Right, yes. Even within the AR schools. New modelling was a separate category. Any of the women we were talking about would have done that. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. But still, it must have been mildly shocking, a little bit naughty. Let's think about Elizabeth Siddell. probably one of the most famous muses of the pre-Raphaelite.

And if memories, this might be a myth, so please correct me. But she was Gabrielle Dante Rossetti, saw her working in a milliners or something. And then he went up and he just said, were you posed for me? It must have still been quite shocking as a young woman to go and pose for an artist, even if you had all of your clothes on. It must have been quite risque. Yeah, indeed. And of course, particularly young women were expected to be entirely modest

and never drawing attention to the girls, never putting themselves forward, never been stared at. I mean, that was being looked at was quite painful for many young men. Well, it's my intention. She wanted to be an artist herself, but she didn't have access to the art schools. And so she took the opportunity to pose as a way into the studios. Yes, that makes much more sense, of course. How old was she when she first posed Elizabeth Siddles? I think she was 20.

He was living at home off the Oakent Road, and so it must have been quite, I'd say, bold for her to take up with the artist and to model for several of them, one, two, three, four, Millet, Holman Hunt. Before she met and persuaded Rosetti to take her artistic ambition seriously. She was Ophelia. She was the lady in the lake. Yeah, and several other of those early figures in the paintings. Yes.

I've heard that she spent so long in the bath posing for the painting that she got pneumonia. She's certainly not numb with cold, as you do if you lie in water for too long. I mean, even if that's a little bit true, that suggests somebody to me that's very dedicated to the art itself, because there was no way in hell you'd have got me to lay in a bath and go numb and have pneumonia. Even when I was working as a life model, it would have just been, no, I'm not doing that. So she must have felt a certain amount of commitment to this. I think that's what we can infer from her actions.

He was willing to put on these funny costumes She was willing to pose She did a terrible kneeling pose Can you imagine? Oh, oh I don't know how they did it Especially when you think that Like certain poses are actually used

As methods of torture around the world And kneeling is one of them Like kneeling on a hard floor For a prolonged length of time Is excruciatingly painful We could only do it for about 60 seconds I think Nothing more than that really

Wow Respect to Lizzie Siddell Her story when it's told is it's often cast as quite a tragic one because she did produce her own art. It's very beautiful, and to my eye, it looks quite accomplished as well. But she is often cast as this very hard done by wife to Gabrielle Rosetti, who was a bit of a dick by all accounts.

Is that true, or is that just part of the pre-Raphaelite myth? Do you view her as a tragic figure? Her life ended tragedy, this is true. But before that, she was very independent and assertive. And I think that was partly what, the attraction between her and Rosetti was that they were two independently minded people who had committed to each other but kept having these bus stops, really. Or Rosetti kept doing something that Lizzie didn't like, and she took herself off. And she spent an awful lot of time out of London, both in East Side places in Britain. She was spent four months in the South of France, some in the Mediterranean.

She wanted to go there because she wanted to go through Paris, which was the centre of fashion. And then, sadly, after they were married, they had a stillborn daughter. And that, I think, tipped her into suicidal depression. I don't ask Gabriel as the villain in this group. I'm glad to hear that. And there's that story, isn't there, that when Lizzie was buried, he put in a book of poetry that he'd written. And then several years later, he realised it was dead, dead, dead good poetry. so insisted that she was dug up so he can get it.

Is that true? Oh, that is absolutely true. I don't know why I'm laughing. That's just, that's horrible. People who know nothing else about the free raffle. They know that. Know that excumation story. Honestly, that, I mean, what was going on there?

Like, somebody that studied the lives and the characters of these people, what was going on there? Putting this manuscript book of poems into her coffin and the top of the coffin, and on top of everything else, not kind of buried inside it. Oh, maybe that makes a bit of a difference. It was in their coffin, but it's a gesture of grief, really. We spent quite a lot of time trying to keep her alive, actually, because she became very addicted to opium.

She wasn't in a good state at all. And then he fell in love with Jane Morris, okay, and started writing poems again, and then wanted to publish a book of poems, because he'd always been aspiring poet, as well as a painting. But some of the poems were in the coffin. So he was persuaded that it was a good idea

and re-incorporated those old poems with the new ones. Prosperity has never forgiven him, and I don't think people do. No. You'd love to just sit him down, wouldn't you, just before he did it and just go, Gabriel, I'm not sure this is the best plan here. This isn't going to do you any favours in the future.

His argument, and he made it quite openly at the time, was that things that Lizzie valued above all were painting and poetry, and that if anybody had been able to open the coffin, if she had been able to open the coffin after he was buried, lift the lid and give him back the poems, she would have done so. The woman that I often think that she gets a bit neglected, is the story of Fanny Carnforth? Fanny Cornforth has been resurrected as a pre-latholite heroine, really.

She deserves that because she was another who seized the opportunity He had no education at all and Bufo was desperately loved with Rosetti and of course at that moment he went off and actually finally married with him, devastated family but she stayed loyal to him right through to the end

and her career is really very remarkable too She's very beautiful in the painting She's big and buxom and blonde and languid And was it a couple of years ago That they discovered where she'd been buried and that it was a pauper's grave, that there'd been no headstone, and that funds were raised

to actually put a proper headstone over her grave. Well, that's true of several as a living. Because a family had to buy a pluss in the cemetery and put up a headstone. So that was quite an expense. And Fanny didn't have any family either. But she has her champions, yes. I was going to say I'm a Fanny champion,

but that's... I'm such a child. I'm sorry, Jan. Is there evidence that Fanny Codford had been selling sex before she became a model. Because I've read some of that, and I just wondered what was your take on that? My take on that is that her name wasn't really known to the outside world after her death and after Rosetti's death. There were kind of rumours.

Who is this Buxon model who features so much in his middle period of paintings? And as you see them all over at the press, often you can recognise family's face when you see it. And gradually, my name emerged. Farncornforce was not her actual name. It was like a modelling name. Do we know what her real name was? She was born Sarah Cox from a Braxmouth family in Sussex.

She was like a good time girl. She certainly measured affection in terms of money and gifts. I can relate. But so did half the female population. What is very strange? It always seems slightly in Congress to me, is that John Ruskin was a huge supporter of the pre-Raphaelites. And maybe I'm muddling up private lives here

because when I look at the pre-Raphylite paintings, I see wild passioned and there's so much sex in it. Maybe I'm just projecting. So in the paintings, that was a major social issue of the time. It'd be like the 1960s, when sexual freedom suddenly sort of hit the public in a way. Yeah. There was a great deal of Victorian horror at this in the 1860s because that young women were, but it was both sexes who were transgressing the proper behaviours.

Yeah. That chastity among men and women became a big issue, public discourse. The pre-raphalite painters were young men who were too poor to marry yet, but nevertheless age meant that they were extremely interested and absorbed by the notion of sexual freedom. And of course, it's also a feature of Western art in general. It really is. The archetypal loose woman is, of course, Mary Magdalene.

Yes. It's always shown with long, flowing locks. When you see that in a pre-Refarite painting, you've got a tradition of Mary Magdalene the sinner. But the proper Victorian women didn't wear their hair loose. Oh, no, they wouldn't be doing such things. But John Ruskin, the art critic, It seems strange to me, because he doesn't seem to have been that open about sex,

perhaps even slightly prudish, that he would gravitate towards this group of artists and really support and champion them. What's your take on that? He championed them in their early chaster days, yes. He did castigate Rosetti, saying when Fanny Cornforth began to feature in Rosetti's paintings, the difference between your paintings where Lizzie was the model, and Fanny is incomparable. And the pictures of Fanny are the ruin of you, artistically.

No. We might have to tell the story about John Ruskin. Is that true that his marriage was annulled because it was never consummated? Yes, so that's all in the public way, of course, because in order to get an annulment, it has to be a legal process. Although I think Ruskin wanted the annulment, as much as his poor wife Effie in June.

maybe 10 years of since I was married. Imagine. But she couldn't really complain because married women didn't. No. There is a story that the reason he couldn't consummate it is because he saw her on the wedding night nude and ran away and it's been kind of spun as it was the sight of her pubic hair that frightened him.

Is that just a historical myth? What is that story? Well, it comes from his deposition at the annarment that her body was not as he was not as he. he had been read to believe. That's on record, isn't it? It doesn't say anything about pubic hair. No.

I mean, I was thinking, this is a youngish woman in her 20s. What could have been physically so appalling? Do you mean that a man who hadn't otherwise got a sexual partner being so revolted that he refused to consummate him? That's where people have jumped in with this notion. It must have been body hair. Do you know, I don't know,

because all we've got is little details. in the annulment trials. For Effie to say, my body wasn't as he thought it would be. It could be anything, couldn't it? He fancied girls. Okay. Pre-adolesan girls.

Ah. That kind of innocence and asexuality was what turned him on. Okay. The picture is darkening a little. Fair enough inference that it was hair that was the boy. Wow. Yes, I think that you've just convinced me of that one. That actually now makes a lot more sense.

But Effie herself, and her pubic hair. She went on to marry John Millers, didn't she? Yes, so he rescued her. And that's a very interesting topic, because they were on holiday, the Ruskins and Millie, happening in Scotland, one summer, and it rained all the time. So they couldn't do much painting. And he watched in dismay at the cruelty with which Ruskin treated his wife, treated Effie on that holiday. And so Milley began to kind of feel very protective towards Effie. And somehow or other, she told him that they were not having to.

I imagine, this is my interpretation. Effie must have said to me, I'm very, very unhappy. I wish I wasn't married, but there's no way I can leave. And he said, put up with it, as it were. When you have children, it will be better. And she must have said, that will never happen because no sex. Wow. And at that point, something must have picked in his brain.

and he told female friends of his, and they then persuaded Effie to start the annulment, that that was the basis for an annulment. Whereas a divorce was after the question, that era, a social death, absolutely. No one would speak to you. No one would invite you anywhere. We were a non-person.

Wow. And did you have a happy marriage with John? Were John and Effie happy? They had eight children. That was more than she expected. That's making up for lost time, Effie. Well done. She had a new life.

as a help meet. She assisted Millie in a lot of his work. She kept the record of all his paintings. She dealt with the clients. She dealt with the models. She dealt with the costumes. She found the locations. She found the subjects. So she was a sort of manager of Millie's career, which went stratospheric. My final question to you is, did the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood disband? Did they have an official meeting where they went, that's it, it's an end of it? Or did they just kind of peter out and go on to other things? Like if they were a band, they would have gone on to pursue solo careers? They dispersed essentially. Homelham went to paint in the Holy Land and Milley became associate with the Royal Academy and so on, so he was on another career path that were leaving the others

way, way behind. Later on, they laughed about it. And it's only in their last 19, 2020 century, where it became much more of an important event in heart history. Wow. They are absolutely incredible and the fact, you know, the work that you've done pointing to the work of the women artists as well is absolutely essential and vital. Jan, you have just been the most fun to talk to today. I could talk to you forever, but I won't. But if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Well, the list of books you usually find if you just Google my name. Yeah, and the exhibition on the Rosettys is still on at the Tate. Yes, it's on. It's on. It's from Trayune into July and then it's travelling to Wilmington, Delaware. So it's around for a bit.

And it's very, very interesting and full of work by Elizabeth Siddell, poems by Christina Rosetti, as well as major and minor paintings by Dante Gable Rosetti, our great giving. Wow. Oh, Jam, thank you so much for talking to me today. You've just been an absolute treat. I've loved every second of it. Thank you. Thank you for listening. and if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you'd like us to explore a subject, if there's something you want us to look into, or if you just want to say hello, you can now email us at betwixt at history hit.com. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex, Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit.

This podcast features music from Epidemic Sound.