The Pre-Raphaelites
In 1848 three English artists came together in Gower Street London and became known as The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: An influential group of artists who rejected the formulaic artistic style of the time. The founding members were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Sir John Everett Millais (The first artist to made a Baronet and a member of the Royal Academy from 1885) and William Holman Hunt OM.
Both Millias and Hunt were Royal Academy students at the time – Rossetti was a student of Ford Madox Brown who studied under Egide Charles Gustave, Baron Wappers in Antwerp: Who was in turn a former student of the Royal Academy in Antwerp and a highly reputable Belgian painter - It was Rossetti who felt romantic poetry and the arts should entwine. The brotherhood quickly attracted new brethren artists which included Dante’s brother William Michael Rossetti: Devout Christian James Collinson: Sculptor Thomas Woolner and Frederic George Stephens (an art critic).
The group set out to reverse the mechanical style of painting adopted by the Mannerists who followed the Renaissance. They believed the Classism and ideal compositions of Raphael had been particularly corrosive to the academia of art and set out to reverse them back to before Raphael: Thus they became known as The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
For the most part the group targeted Sir Joshua Reynolds – Founder of the Royal Academy. They referred to him as Sir Sloshua insinuating his loose painterly style was a shoddy version of Mannerism. However, the Pre-Raphaelites Brotherhood did not make the group known to the Royal Academy – Every member signing their art works with their name followed by just the initials "PRB".
Mannerism was the artistic style practiced throughout Europe from around 1520 – 1560: Although in Italy where Mannerism had begun it did not pass until after the High Renaissance and the arrival of the Baroque Style. The style was born from a reaction to the sophisticated intellect, visual idealism and controlled realism associated with Renaissance art – Particularly in-light of the most influential artists of all who were Michelangelo and Raphael.
Northern Mannerism describes those more experimental arts practiced in the Alpine regions of Northern Europe (particularly Prague) and the Netherlands throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Mannerism was a term applied to many art works and artists – The Antwerp Mannerists being among the most notable. They were a group of anonymous painters working in Antwerp early in the sixteenth century who rejected the classic style – Although their reaction was more toward the early Netherlanders painting of the Late Gothic and Renaissance era produced by artists such as Jan Van Eyck.
The Pre-Raphaelites were reformists. Their ideas were first published in The Germ in January 1850: An unsuccessful periodical of ideas, verse and literature issued by the group that was only published four times. The Pre-Raphaelites had hoped The Germ (as in the Germ of an idea) would sprout forth and develop new ideas.
In the beginning the Pre-Raphaelites believed that conventional artistic concepts learned by repetition should give way to original concepts and ideas: That to do this it was crucial to study the natural world intently in order to understand how to express it effectively and honestly. They also believed the ultimate goal was to produce art that looked extremely good! Inarguably, their principles were loose with no true moral dogmas attached. It was very much the prerogative of the artist as to how they depicted those original concepts and ideas. To the Pre-Raphaelites artistic freedom and responsibility lived hand in hand.
The Pre-Raphaelites sought to revive the arts in a wave of complex compositions that were typically exuberant in detail. The muddy hues of the Raphaelites were replaced by intense colors. The Pre-Raphaelite paintings of Millais, Hunt and Rossetti were exhibited in 1849 with little debate forthcoming. However, when Christ in the House of his Parents by Millais was exhibited in 1850 it was labeled blasphemous by Charles Dickens and critics: As well as Sir Charles Lock Eastlake who was the President of the Academy. Their work was labeled backward, the abundance of detail seen as disturbing to the eye and so unpleasant – At which point Collinson broke from the group and subsequently disbanded.
In the twentieth century the Stuckists, the Brotherhood of Ruralists and the Birmingham group somewhat revived the aims of the Pre-Raphaelites: The almost photographical precision of the Pre-Raphaelites now being of great artistic interest since the seventies.
To contemporary minds Pre-Raphaelitism appears as a
quintessentially English art movement and this is exactly what was intended by
the young men who formed themselves into the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood in
1848. In the autumn of that year Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his brother William
Michael Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, Thomas Woolner, Frederic George Stephens
and James Collinson joined John Everett Millais at his parents’ house in London’s
Gower Street. Here they examined engravings after early Italian frescoes and
saw in them the sincerity and seriousness of purpose which they perceived to be
missing from English Art. Every where
the old order was under threat: February had witnessed revolution in Paris and
in April the Chartists had marched through the streets of London demanding
universal suffrage. However excited the
Pre-Raphaelite brethren were by such events, it was artistic reform rather than
political revolution that they wanted. Six
of the seven were artists who were opposed to the methods of training promoted
by the British Royal Academy Schools. Famously dubbing Sir Joshua Reynolds, the
first president of the Royal Academy as ‘Sir Sloshua!’, the PRBs announced
themselves opposed to sombre palettes, meretricious effects and conventional
subject matter. Initially ridiculed for
their pretension, by the end of the 1850s intense coloring, careful draughtsmanship
and a new symbolic vocabulary would be acknowledged as the defining characteristics
of contemporary paintings.
The term Pre-Raphaelite is commonly used to refer to
examples of art and design produced throughout the second half of the 19th
century. But what exactly do we mean by ‘Pre-Raphaelite’? It is difficult to
identify a common denominator between
for example the sentimental appeal of John Everett Millais’ The Huguenot
(1852), the moralising symbolism of Holman Hunt’s The light of the World (1853), and the sensual languor of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Monna Vanna (1866). It is even more difficult to do so
when faced with the ethereal figures of Edward Burne-Jones, the modern life
imagery of Ford Madox-Brown and the arts and crafts furnishings designed by
William Morris. None of these men were present
at the meeting in Gower Street, nor were any of the female artists, such as
Elizabeth Siddal, Joanna Boyce and Marie Spartali Stillman to name a but a few
who worked in a Pre-Raphaelite idiom. To understand the connections between the
range of diverse practices that are called Pre-Raphaelite, it is helpful to see
the movements as having two dominant strands. The first began in the early
1850s and is identified with the paintings of Millais and Hunt and the art criticism
of John Ruskin. The second began in the 1850s and is identified with the
paintings Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his admirers. Both sprang from the meeting
in Gower Street in 1848.
Having returned to their studio, the Pre-Raphaelite artists
developed a style of painting in which an intense brilliance was achieved by
applying thin layers of oil paint over a white ‘ground’. It was in 1849 that
the first paintings executed in this manner appeared at exhibition: Millais’
Isabella (1848-49) and Hunt’s Rienzi (1848-49) were both shown at the Royal Academy
and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848-49) was shown at the
Free Exhibition on Hyde Park Corner. Despite depicting very different subjects,
all three paintings celebrate youthful opposition to a prevailing social,
political or symbolic order. Millais
painting depicts a scene from Keats Poem ‘Isabella, or, Pot of Basil’ which
relates to a fourteenth century tale of love cutting across the classes. Hunt’s
painting depicts the moment at which the hero of Bulwer Lytton’s novel Rienzi
renounces the contemplative life and takes up arms in order to avenge the death
of his young brother. Rossetti’s painting, or rather the sonnet he wrote to
explain its symbolism, proclaims the right of the artist to replace
conventional symbolism with his own. Despite such youthful pretensions and the
inclusion of the monogram PRB, the critical response to these paintings was, on
the whole, favourable, and all three artists found buyers for these early
works.
It was in 1850 that the meaning
of the monogram PRB became known and the suggestion that a secret, possibly
Roman Catholic, sect was a t work caused considerable consternation amongst the
critics. When the annual Exhibition of the London Royal Academy opened in May
of that year, the stage was set for England’s first ever clash between the establishment
and an artistic avant-garde. Much of the controversy centred upon a painting by
Millais, Christ in the House of His Parents (1849). Charles Dickens made a satirical attack on
the movement as whole, and Millais’ painting in particular, in his journal
Household Words. What particularly offended Dickens was the name of the
Brotherhood. It was commonly believed that Raphael was responsible for claiming
‘beauty’ as a defining element of art, and that, ever since Raphael’s time, the
purpose of art had been to reflect the striving of the human soul towards the
ideal. To call oneself Pre-Raphaelite was, for Dickens, to turn the idea of
artistic progress on its head. And, to paint Christ as ‘a hideous, wry-necked,
blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed gown’ was for the author, a deliberate
attempt by the artist to gain notoriety rather than respect.
In 1851, the art critic of The
Times, in a contentious review, called attention to ‘that strange disorder of
the mind or the eyes which continues to rage with unabated absurdity among a
class of juvenile artists who style themselves ‘PRB’.
The Pre-Raphaelites may have had
powerful detractors, but they were also to discover a powerful ally. The
vitriolic nature of such criticism let the art theorist John Ruskin, author of
Modern Painters (1843), to write two letters to The Times in defence of their
art. Later that year, Ruskin issued a
pamphlet entitled Pre-Raphaelitism, in which he claimed that, the Pre-Raphaelite
artists alone had followed the precepts laid down in his writings. According to Ruskin, the artist ‘...should go
to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly,
having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember
her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing; believing
all things to right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth.
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