THE EARLY PRE-RAPHAELITES: THE FIRST FIVE YEARS, 1848-53
Joseph Voelker has contributed a summary of Angela Cox’s lecture.
By focusing on the early years of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Angela Cox was able to distil a large subject into a manageable topic. The focus also allowed her to lead us through detailed examination of the artists’ paintings.
By the summer of 1848, Europe had experienced a variety of revolutionary upheavals. Even stable England had seen revolutionary thought presented in the form of the Chartist petition. In that year a group of young English artists formed a society to capture the freshness and simplicity, the directness and beauty, of art from before Raphael. Drawing on the same moral-aesthetic ideas that underpin the theories of Pugin and Ruskin, they radically altered the style and subject matter of their painting. In order to advance their cause, they founded a secret (or not-so secret) society, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB). Three of the founders were William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais. It is on these three that the lecture focused.
We were able to see what the Brotherhood rejected by looking first at Millais’ Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru, a work from 1846 that predates the founding of the PRB, Painted when he was only 16, Millais’ Pizarro is of an historical subject painted in a high academic style – it is exactly this choice of subject matter and style the Brotherhood would soon reject. Millais uses an academic style - here the use of nudes, strong pyramidal composition and chiaroscuro (strong contrast of light and dark) - to display a history from long ago and far away.
We then examined the contrast between academic painting and Pre-Raphaelite painting by looking at Millais’ Isabella and Lorenzo from 1849. Though still the work of a teenager, this painting demonstrates the shift that the Pre-Raphaelites made in painting. Now the subject is from English literature – a poem of Keats in this instance. Now the painting is done with a fine brush on a white ground - creating a brightly coloured, sharply detailed rendering. Millais used an early Renaissance style of perspective, and filled his image with everyday objects that act as symbolic signifiers. And, he has signed the painting PRB for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
The PRB felt they were returning to the simplicity and to the higher morality of early art. In this they were influenced by Ruskin, who in his anti-classicism argued that medieval art was morally superior to the rule-bound art of the Renaissance. For Ruskin, and those influence by him, craftsmanship and workshop practice were morally good.
Looking at Rossetti’s Girlhood of the Virgin and Annunciation, allowed us to see another member of the brotherhood embracing the new style. Rossetti, like the other members of the PRB, used family and friends as his models. He rejected the academy’s idealization of the human form and face.
These new developments in art were not universally well received. The public were offended by the earthbound quality of Millais’ Christ in the house of his parents of 1850 when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy. Even Dickens, though he later became fond of the PRB, dismissed the early paintings.
Very quickly after the early paintings, the PRB began to move in different directions. Rossetti, with his connections and private patrons, did not need to exhibit. Millais became more and more sentimental. Holman Hunt, while often using models, returned to idealization to paint the face of Christ in his Light of the World.
Like so many youthful bursts of idealism, the PRB gave way to the pressures of the world and worldliness. While Holman Hunt, because of (or in spite of) his conversion to evangelical Christianity, remained relatively in tune with the founding principals of the PRB, Millais, who married Ruskin’s wife after her annulment for non-consummation, needed to make money. He turned to a less detailed style which allowed him to produce more paintings quickly; and he turned to popular subjects including portraiture, which allowed him to appeal to more customers.
Yet for a brief period, the PRB produce luxurious images that encapsulated the mid-19th century’s reaction against the machine, the unjust, and the immoral.
Many of the paintings that Angela Cox referred to are in the National Gallery, Tate Britain or the V & A. Or they can be readily viewed by searching for them on line.