Text h. Pre-Raphaelitism and Victorian Painting

Inspired like the Chartists by the spirit of revolt, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a militant group, the first organized revolt against the Royal Academy, the objects of its attack, being on the one hand the dark and pretentious history picture and on the other trivial anecdotes, and in particular what the Brotherhood termed the 'monkeyana' of Landseer. The remedy and the ideal was seen in a double aspect; as the 'truth to nature', expounded in Modern Painters by Ruskin and as a return to the purity of art before the High Renaissance period, along the lines suggested by the earlier 'Pre-Raphaelite' movement of the German 'Nazarenes'. There were many possibilities of complication in this duality which were to appear the more complex because of the very different temperaments of the leaders of the movement, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), and John Everett Millais (1829-96). 'Truth to nature', a conception which Constable (much more specifically than Turner) had applied to landscape painting, suggested such realism as might be gained in painting from nature, that is, in the open air, and indeed for a while this was a Pre-Raphaelite practice, showing in theory a certain correspondence with the aims of Realism and later of Impressionism in France. Yet whereas French painters were mainly concerned with the general truth of light and atmospheric effect, the Pre-Raphaelites looked for it in minuteness and precision of detail. They differed also in devoting themselves to figure subjects in the main, with an ethical and narrative content. A further difference was the tendency encouraged by Rossetti in particular to look back sentimentally and nostalgically to the past, which took on a dream-like attraction. Thus, instead of that beautifully logical development which produced the masterpieces of nineteenth-century French art, England produced a strange, though potent mixture of enthusiasms in which painting took on several aspects and eventually became subordinated to aims of wider social import.

The great period of Pre-Raphaelite painting can be placed within the decade 1850 to 1860. It is marked by intensity of feeling, a brilliance of colour which banished brown and earth colours from the palette (as the Impressionists were to do), and tours de force of detailed execution. Millais as a young man produced a number of works of great beauty with religious and Shakespearean themes. In colour and feeling The Return of the Dove to the Ark, 1851, excels even the celebrated Christ in the House of His Parents. His Ophelia, 1852, with its almost photographically minute background painted on the Ewell River near Kingston-on-Thames and its figure portraying the beauty of Miss Siddal, remains a remarkable picture.

Holman Hunt painted a masterpiece of its kind in The Hireling Shepherd of 1851 with a sunlit background of willows and cornfield which for a moment makes one think of Claude Monet. The fanatic search for 'truth' which sent him to the shores of the Red Sea to paint a religiously symbolic subject invests The Scapegoat of 1854 with a Surrealist strangeness. Rossetti, apart in his poetic medievalism, reached the highest point of his art in watercolors of an imaginary past and great emotional intensity such as The Tune of the Seven Towers of 1857.

With all its curiosities of effort, this Pre-Raphaelite period has never lost its enchantment. How young artists in the industrial and mercantile England of the mid nineteenth century responded and rallied to an ideal exacting devoted toil is evident in the immediate spread of its enthusiasm and methods, though they had their effect also on artists somewhat older than the young champions of the Brotherhood. William Dyce (1806-64) seems to reflect the quasi-photographic aspect of its realism in the enduring charm of Pegwell Bay, Kent painted probably in 1859, a picture in which he strikingly departs from a rigid style due to German Nazarene influence. Ford Madox Brown (1821-93), at first outside the movement, so far entered into its spirit as to produce some of its most characteristic paintings, among them Work, with its glorification of manual labour and its brilliant glimpse of Heath Street, Hampstead. Inclined to overlabour his subject, Madox Brown displays Pre-Raphaelite colour at its best in landscapes of more simple intention.

It is a sad aspect of the Pre-Raphaelite story that none of these painters lived up to their first promise and in various ways lost direction. The remark applies almost equally to Millais, Rossetti, and Hunt though the decline or deflection in each case was individual. The nostalgic element overcame the challenging realism, in painting at all events.

A second phase inspired by Rossetti and represented by William Morris (1834-96) and Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98) is mainly of note for a change of direction towards the crafts and the problem of providing a counter to the ugliness and soullessness of industrial production. The delicate mannered painting of Burne-Jones is of less value than his collaboration with Morris in the arts of design. In this and other ways Pre-Raphaelitism may be looked on as anti-Victorian, a protest against the materialism of the age, either as an attempt at reform or as escape into the past, its weakness appearing in the latter respect.