| I have been fascinated by the works of the Pre-Raphaelites from an early age. Their classical themes, the almost stain-glass luminosity and great attention to detail, have been a major influence in my own paintings. | |
| The
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), an association of talented young painters,
was formed in London in 1848. The oldest of the founding members, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), was only 21. The other chief members were
William Holman Hunt (1828-1910)and John Everett Millais (1829-96). Although the Brotherhood did not last long as a group and diminished in less than a decade, its influence was evident in leading Victorian art as well as art of the early 20th century. Before the formation and impact of the Brotherhood, British art was very much dominated by the Royal Academy (founded in 1768, under the patronage of George III). Despite the work of men such as Turner and Constable, the style of painting favoured by the Royal Academy tended towards that of the Old Masters, with abundant use of brown paint. |
The Light of the World |
The
Pre-Raphaelites deliberately challenged the established view of art,
and drew up a manifesto of their intentions, published in the four issues
of a periodical called The Germ. They would paint direct from
nature, with objective truthfulness and genuine ideas in sympathy with
what was direct and heartfelt in the art of the past – in particular
art before Raphael. |
|
The Hireling Shepherd |
The painters of the Brotherhood made meticulous studies of the colours in nature, reproducing them brightly and clearly and working them into a wet, white ground. They went to great lengths to find exact models for the settings and people in their pictures. In their desire to depict genuine, deeply significant themes they turned to the Bible for inspiration. Among the most significant of their early paintings were Hunt's Light of the World and The Hireling Shepherd, Millais' Christ in the House of his Parents and Rossetti's two versions of the Annunciation theme. |
| Initially, critics such as Charles Dicken, disliked the kind of realism that, for example showed Christ's father as a workingman with dirty fingernails and the Virgin as an ordinary young girl. But the great critic John Ruskin praised their works, defending them strongly and the new painters soon had their admirers, particularly among the increasingly affluent middle classes of the Midlands and North of England. | |
Christ in the House of His
Parents |
The
high-minded aims of the Brotherhood proved insufficient to hold the
interest of Rossetti's fertile imagination and the restless skills of
Millais for long. Only Hunt stayed faithful to the ideals of the Brotherhood.
The other two developed in other directions, replacing biblical inspiration
with that of the medieval world, the plays of Shakespeare and other
sources made popular by the Romantic movement of the early 19th century. |
| Though
the Brotherhood dissolved in about 1853, the new climate in art was one
with which many other artists identified. Foremost among them was Ford Madox Brown, a friend of the Brotherhood who shared their ideas. Brown, who had been born abroad and received his artistic training in Europe, was not much drawn to the biblical aspects of the Brotherhood's work and its close identification with the religious ethos of the time in England. His early paintings were more Romantic in character, often based on the poetry of Byron. |
Byron's Dream |
Pygmalion and
the Image: The Soul Attains |
As
Queen Victoria's reign lengthened, the British became more aware of
their Imperial role. Interest grew in classical literature and the history
of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in the legendary medieval past
of Britain itself. In art, Edward Burne-Jones was the prolific master
of both the classical and the medieval scene, producing works like the
Pygmalion series and King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid
in which the theme of the moral superiority of nobility of character
above worldly wealth began to appear. |
The technical standards of these paintings, set by the Pre-Raphaelites, were very high and were maintained throughout the period, for Victorian patrons would not accept anything other than expert craftsmanship. Among the new generation of classical painters were men like Feredric, Lord Leighton, Sir Edward Poynter and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema , whose idealized visions of the lives of ancient Greeks and Romans had the comfortable serenity of fairy tales. |
King Cophetua and the Beggar
Maid |
Anthony and Cleopatra |
There
were other currents at work in the stream of art, an important one having
been set in motion by Rossetti, who was a poet as well as a painter.
He developed a more symbolic style of painting, full of mysterious undertones,
using colour not to describe nature realistically, but to suggest mood
and feeling. This became the artistic theme which Walter Pater, an admirer
of the Pre-Raphaelites, expressed in his writings on art, which were
to stir up new ideas and attitudes. |
These ideas, though not to everyone's taste, represented a change in attitude common amongst the more affluent society at the close of the century, who saw in the cultured hedonism of such paintings as Godward's Dolce Far Niente, an acceptable philosophy of life - that pleasure or happiness is the sole or chief good in life. Alongside
this intimate boudoir art ran a continuing tendency to paint epic
scenes. John Byam Shaw's Love the conqueror, branded by one
critic as trivial, was painted in 1899, when Impressionism, which
had seized the high ground of art in France and was opening the gates
to 20th-century painting, was already a generation old.
|
Dolce Far Niente |
The Pre-Raphaelites influenced the work of many later British artists well into the twentieth century. Rossetti later came to be seen as a precursor of the wider European Symbolist movement. The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (England) has a world-renowned collection of works by Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelites which strongly influenced the young J.R.R. Tolkien while he was growing up in the city. In the twentieth century artistic ideals changed and art moved away from representing reality. Since the Pre-Raphaelites were fixed on portraying things with near-photographic precision, though with a distinctive attention to detailed surface-patterns, their work was devalued by many critics. However, since the 1970s there has been a resurgence in interest in the movement. |
|
Katy Kianush
October 2006
|
Top of page |
Copyright shall at all times remain vested in the Author. No part of the work shall be used, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the Author's express written consent.
Copyright © 2006 K. Kianush, Art Arena
