The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Revolutionaries II

Notes from episode 2 of a BBC4 series on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Notes from episode 1 are here.

After focusing on a new realistic approach to painting sacred scenes and scenes from modern urban life, the Pre-Raphaelites turned to a new approach to landscape painting, featuring a microscopic examination of the natural world, with closely observed scientific fidelity (following the ideas of John Ruskin). Landscape painting had been traditionally executed in the studio from sketches. John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt used the newly established train system to get out of London into the countryside, along with all their paints and easels and canvasses.

John Everett Millais' Ophelia (1852):

This painting breaks a number of established 'rules' - for example, the river flows (counterintuitively) from right to left, rather than the traditional left-to-right. Many of the featured flowers come straight from Shakespeare's text, and are painted in exquisite, botanical detail. The backdrop was painted in situ in Surrey, and the figure of drowned Ophelia was painted in the studio, with Elizabeth Siddal in a big bath of water. Unlike his earlier controversial works, this painting was highly acclaimed.

William Holman Hunt's The Hireling Shepherd (1851):

This painting was painted on top of a white background, rather than the traditional dark foundation - to try and capture the luminosity of nature under the bright sun. Minute details were painted with a very fine brush - every blade of grass and every eyelash.

John Everett Millais' Portrait of John Ruskin (1854):

Ruskin commissioned Millais to paint his portrait against a Scottish landscape. There is no horizon, which was itself an innovation in landscape portraiture. The painting focuses on the detail of the rock on which he is standing, with geological detail. Millais fell in love with Ruskin's wife Effie, who was still a virgin after 5 years of marriage. They married in 1855, and the relation between Millais and Ruskin never recovered. Ruskin diverted his patronage to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who continued to embrace medievalism, rather than the realism of the other Pre-Raphaelites.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice: Dante Drawing the Angel (1853):

William Holman Hunt's Our English Coasts (1852):

This was painted at Hastings on the Sussex coast, with careful depictions of the geological formations of the collapsing coastline (influenced by Charles Lyell's great work on British geology). The sheep assembled on the brink of the cliff are a "metaphor for what is going on in Britain at this time", i.e. fear of a resumption of the Napoleonic Wars, with Napoleon III recently established on the French throne. The tiny steamship in the background emphasises the modernity of the scene. One sheep is caught in the brambles, appealing to the viewer for help. The painting is painted at the end of the day (see the lengthening shadows), adding to the ominous atmosphere.

Close associate Ford Madox Brown's Pretty Baa-Lambs (1852):

The entire scene is painted out-of-doors (including the models, probably for the first time in painting), ensuring consistent conditions of light. Many of the details of light and shade (e.g. coloured shadows) are also innovative. This painting was not executed according to the 'rules', but by fresh, new observation.

Ford Madox Brown's An English Autumn Afternoon (1852-55):

This is the view from the back window of Brown's cottage in Hampstead. It doesn't look like any landscape painting ever made before, with its panoramic perspective and microscopic detail. It is both deeply objective and deeply subjective. The canvas is shaped like an eye. This 'immediacy of vision', almost photographic, is a property of all the Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Revolutionaries

Notes from episode 1 of a BBC4 series on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group founded in the revolutionary year of 1848 by three young painters from London's Royal Academy - John Everett Millais (1829-96), William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82, the bohemian son of a political refugee from Italy). The group set out to overturn the prevailing dogma of the art establishment ("lazy, predictable and boring"), in particular the rules of composition derived from the renaissance Italian painter Raphael. In doing so, they shocked the London art world, attracting unprecedented levels of negative criticism (for example from Charles Dickens).

The Pre-Raphaelites' early paintings involved the controversial application of a bold new realism to sacred subjects, in an attempt to 'restore meaning to art'.

John Everett Millais' Christ in the House of his Parents (1850):

This painting was painted to shock, deliberately breaking the accepted rules of composition, in particular the 'pyramid structure' copied from Raphael. In addition, there is an audacious, almost blasphemous, realism (wrinkles, dirty toenails, sunburn, protruding veins etc.), which was a complete break with the customary idealistic approach to representing saintly religious figures.

William Holman Hunt's A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids (1850):

This painting is modelled like a Roman relief sculpture, with everything foregrounded, rather than the traditional Raphaelite pyramid. The use of apertures to show secondary scenes in the background harks back to 15th century paintings.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850):

This painting portrays the Archangel Gabriel as a 'corporeal', wingless young man (naked under his gown) thrusting a lily stem at Mary's womb, symbolising the moment of the immaculate conception. The accepted rules of perspective are abandoned - the space is 'foreshortened'.

The PRB then moved on to painting insalubrious subjects from modern urban life, fully ten years before the French Impressionists did the same. These often involved the role of women in society, at a time when women outnumbered men.

John Everett Millais' Mariana in the Moated Grange (1851):

This painting is inspired by a poem by Tennyson, and explores women's dependence on marriage. Mariana's dowry has been lost at sea, and she has thus been abandoned by her fiance Angelo, forced into a nunlike existence. An image of lassitude, boredom, ennui, and sexual frustration.

William Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience (1853):

This painting explores the role of the kept woman, and the increasing visibility of prostitutes in urban society. One important point is that this is a 'portrait' of a prostitute (modelled by real-life prostitute Annie Miller) rather than a 'caricature'. The back wall has a mirror reflecting the door to the garden, i.e. we are presented with the 'whole view'. Key features are the discarded glove on the floor, the fact that she has just jumped out of his lap as if in sudden realisation of her situation, the cat under the table imitating the pose of the man with respect to a bird trying to escape.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Found (185?):

This painting was modelled by Rossetti's mistress, Fanny Cornforth. It depicts a prostitute at the end of the road, a former country girl laid low by a life of urban vice. A countryman has come up to London to take his calf to market and spots his former sweetheart, who recoils in shame. Key features are the calf trapped under the net, on its way to be slaughtered, and the intertwined hands of the two protagonists.

Although the PRB had achieved their aims of reforming British art, they were still critically damned, and their work didn't sell. But then John Ruskin, the trusted Victorian art critic (and suspected paedophile!) came to their defence, in a supportive letter to the Times. This marked a turning point in the Pre-Raphaelites' fortunes.

Episode 2 here.