Revolutionaries who applied a fresh brush to religion and reform
The artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood used a variety of techniques, and some were almost as famous for their romantic affairs as for their art.
The artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood have settled into a kind of hazy Victoriana and it can be easy to overlook how revolutionary they were. The seven members of the brotherhood and their followers were part of the counterculture of the 19th century. If their art was retrospective – they were inspired by the so-called “primitive” artists of the Italian Renaissance – they could not be called backward in matters of religion, social reform and sex.
Some of their number, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti were almost as famous for their romantic affairs as for their art. An exhibition opening on Saturday at the Art Gallery of Ballarat includes pen-and-ink drawings by Rossetti of Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris, muses he referred to as his “stunners”. Siddal became his wife and Jane Morris, married to his friend, William Morris, was very likely his lover.
“Nobody knows for sure whether they had an affair – the letters that might tell us have been destroyed,” says curator Christiana Payne.
“But, certainly, he was obsessed by her face, and he drew her and painted her over and over again … So they probably did have an affair, and William Morris seems to have accepted it in a resigned way. He couldn’t do much about it.”
The exhibition, Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings and Watercolours, is from the renowned collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and features work by John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Rossetti and other artists in their circle. Significantly, it includes drawings by women artists such as Siddal, whose artistry is now more widely recognised. Payne, professor emerita of art history of Oxford Brookes University, curated the exhibition for the Ashmolean in 2021, and it was mounted again there last year.
The brotherhood was founded in London in the pivotal year of 1848. They didn’t issue a pamphlet or set of principles – and members of the group would follow their own paths – but they shared an undeniable impetus to remake the art of their time. They were inspired by the clarity and freshness of observation they saw in artists of the early Renaissance in Italy.
“One of the things that’s tricky about the Pre-Raphaelites is that they didn’t produce a manifesto in 1848,” Payne says.
“There is no record of their first meeting – we just have people’s recollections afterwards, and they do differ a bit. Hunt said in his memoirs that they were in revolt against the elders of the Royal Academy – they met as students at the Royal Academy, and they didn’t like what their teachers were telling them.”
Payne says a hallmark of the Pre-Raphaelites was their determination to see the world with fresh eyes, to reject the nostrums of academic art, and to devise new images for the representation of religious and historical themes.
The original “brothers” were Hunt, Rossetti and his brother, William Michael Rossetti, Millais, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner. John Ruskin, the artist, lecturer and critic, was not a member of the brotherhood but his teaching and example was influential on key members of the group.
The exhibition includes examples of Ruskin’s drawings and watercolours: closely observed renderings of a lily, a partridge and a crab, as well as architectural drawings and landscapes.
“I defy anybody not to like Ruskin’s drawings – he was such a natural draughtsman,” Payne says.
Hunt may serve as an example of the Pre-Raphaelites’ ideas as they originally intended them. The exhibition includes three early drawings – one on the back of an envelope – of his initial thoughts for what would be his most famous painting, The Light of the World. The picture shows Christ holding a lantern and knocking on a door, representing the human soul.
The drawings show how Hunt developed his ideas, including a sketch for the lantern, which he had made especially: such was the Pre-Raphaelites’ commitment to painting from life. The intense colours and the naturalistic details in the painting also are typical of the style.
“The Pre-Raphaelites wanted to paint everything from nature,” Payne says. “He posed a figure in an orchard in the moonlight – he actually had a stuffed figure to draw from. He made studies outdoors, at night, to get the lighting right, and he had the special lantern made so he could see how the light reflected on the robe that Christ is wearing.”
The Pre-Raphaelites radically rethought the subjects of art and how they would be depicted. Viewers, including Charles Dickens, were appalled at the treatment of biblical figures in Millais’ painting Christ in the House of his Parents, which has Jesus as a redhead kid. And, Payne explains, Hunt’s painting The Light of the World is not the example of orthodox Christianity it appears.
“It was a totally new interpretation of a religious theme, and this is one of the things the Pre-Raphaelites liked doing,” she says. “The lantern he had made (for the painting) has lots of different openings in it – and these are all symbolic of different churches, including paganism and Judaism. The meaning of this was that the light of God can come into the soul through lots of different channels – it doesn’t just have to come through Christianity.”
Rossetti and Burne-Jones are represented with portraits and designs which show how they departed from the original ideas of the brotherhood. They came to be associated with the aesthetic movement and medieval subjects, and with decorative and design work with William Morris.
“A lot of their (figure) paintings and drawings are quite androgynous,” Payne says. “Some of the pictures of Jane Morris look quite masculine. Burne-Jones was criticised for painting in such a way that you couldn’t tell if the figures were male or female. In that respect, they are quite modern.”
The exhibition demonstrates the variety of techniques the artists used, with drawings in pen, pencil, chalk and watercolour. Two paintings are done with bodycolour, a fortified watercolour that has the appearance of gouache. Marie Spartali Stillman – another of Rossetti’s models who became a prolific artist – is represented with her painting, Cloister Lilies. Another painting, Two Acolytes Censing, Pentecost, is by Simeon Solomon, who made a speciality of beautiful young men in religious vestments. He was convicted of homosexual offences in 1873 and sentenced to 18 months’ hard labour, after which he no longer exhibited his work.
Payne says she hopes the scandalous lives of the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle don’t obscure their artistic accomplishments. And she says the women associated with the Pre-Raphaelites – not only muses and lovers, but artists in their own right – deserve greater attention for their contribution.
“Women played an important part in the movement,” she says. “And what’s being recognised now is that Elizabeth Siddal was important not just as a model, but as an artist. She wasn’t trained, she couldn’t go to the Royal Academy – women weren’t allowed as students – but she had great imaginative powers. And, for Rossetti, the power of invention was the most important thing.”
Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings and Watercolours and an associated exhibition, In the Company of Morris, are the Art Gallery of Ballarat, May 20-August 6.
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