The Pre-Raphaelites

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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Unknown to one another, Rossetti and Holman Hunt both had a passion for the poetry of Keats, and it was this that first really brought them together. It was in 1848 that Rosetti persuaded Madox Brown to have him as a pupil, and to the Academy of that year Hunt had sent a painting inspired by a poem of Keats. In the memoirs which he wrote in his old age, Mr Hunt gave an account of how he met the younger artist in a picture gallery and what ensued:

Rossetti came up to me (he wrote) loudly declaring that my picture of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ was the best in the collection....Rossetti frankly proposed to me to come and see him. Before this I had been only on nodding terms with him in the schools, to which he came but rarely and irregularly. He had always attracted there a following of clamorous students who, like Millais’s throng, were rewarded with original sketches. Rossetti’s subjects were of a different class from Millais, not of newly culled facts, but of knights rescuing ladies. A few days more and Rossetti was in my studio.

The upshot of these meetings was that Rossetti left Madox Brown and shared a studio with Holman Hunt, under whose guidance he began painting his first picture, ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin.’ Intimacy with Hunt naturally led to intimacy with his friend Millais, and it is said that the immediate occasion of the founding of the Brotherhood was an evening spent by the three friends in the house of Millais’s parents looking at engravings of the early Italian wall-paintings in the Campo Santo at Pisa. According to Mr Hunt, it was Rossetti who insisted that their union should be a close one, and that it should be styled a ‘Brotherhood.’ The term ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ originated as a nickname, somebody exclaiming when they had expressed a preference for the painters before Raphael to those who succeeded him, ‘Why, then you must be Pre-Raphaelites.’ The title was adopted as an official label which fitly conveyed their aims. These aims were to paint Nature with minute fidelity and to regain the intense sincerity of the early Italian painters, but undoubtedly Rossetti held that the latter also implied intense poetic expression.

Thus the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established, and in addition to the three founders, membership was extended to Dante Gabriel’s brother, W M Rossetti, and to three of their friends, Woolner, a sculptor, James Collinson, and F G Stephens. James Collinson was probably elected on the strength of his picture, ‘The Charity Boy’s Debut,’ in the Academy of 1847, and would doubtless have been a more important figure had he not ceased exhibiting after 1870 and retired to a monastery. His most important picture, ‘St Elizabeth of Hungary,’ painted in 1851, is now in the Johannesburg Gallery. William Rossetti and Stephens soon abandoned painting; both became art critics, and their eloquent and enthusiastic articles did much to convert the public to an appreciation of the work of the other Brothers.

It is no unusual thing for art students or young artists to form themselves into clubs and societies, to hold regular meetings, and to discuss their aims, methods, and ideals; but so often the talk leads to nothing. In the case of Millais and Hunt it led to something approaching a masterpiece at the first effort. In 1848 Millais had exhibited ‘Cymon and Iphigenia,’ another painting in the style of Etty; in 1849 he exhibited ‘Lorenzo and Isabella,’ now at Liverpool, and but for the conclaves of the brethren and the stimulating encouragement of comradeship he could never in one year have leapt the gulf which separates the two pictures. Holman Hunt’s ‘Rienzi’ was an equally sensational advance on his ‘St Agnes’s Eve,’ but in many respects the most remarkable achievement of all was Rossetti’s ‘Girlhood of Mary Virgin.’ Finely painted as ‘Lorenzo and Isabella’ is, it has not the touching simplicity of Rossetti’s first painting; it is more imitative, a skilful exercise in the manner of the early Italian masters. It was immensely clever, but it was not quite what the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood set out to do.

Rossetti’s maiden effort may appear childish in places when compared with the accomplishment of the Millais, but it is a much better example of true Pre-Raphaelitism in its absolutely honest and unconventional attempt to render what the painter saw. Mr Hunt has told us that every detail in this picture was painted directly from life under his supervision, and it says much for his patient influence that in the first year of the Brotherhood its most romantic member should have painted the most naturalistic picture.

The Pre-Raphaelites (continued)