The Pre-Raphaelites

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

The trouble with Rossetti, owing to his teeming, poetic imagination, had been that he had always wanted to paint things ‘out of his head’ a time when his hand and eye needed to be educated by an endeavor to paint truly what was before him. With infinite tact Holman Hunt let him set to work on a romantic subject, the choice of his heart, but he took care that every detail in this imaginative scene should be painted truly and carefully from facts. In Madox Brown’s studio Rossetti had rebelled at painting so prosaic an object as a pot. Holman Hunt led him to paint the same object with delight because it held the symbolical lily needed by his subject. For the first time in his life Rossetti became passionately interested in things, because he had been made to see that they helped him to express his ideas. He borrowed big books from his father and window curtains from his parents’ house in Charlotte Street. His sister Christina sat for the Virgin, and his mother for St Anne. He borrowed a child’s nightgown and painted that on a small lay-figure, which probably explains why the figure of the little angel is not so convincing as the head; but when we remember that Rossetti was painting every object in the picture for the very first time we are compelled to stop fault-finding to marvel at the wonder of his achievement.

‘Rienzi’ and ‘Lorenzo and Isabella’ were exhibited in the Academy of 1849; ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin’ in the Hyde Park Gallery known as the ‘Free Exhibition’; but somewhat to the disappointment of their authors they attracted very little public attention. Even the ‘P.R.B’ after Rossetti’s signature on his picture appears to have escaped comment. Undismayed, if a trifle disappointed, the young revolutionaries set about more vigorous propaganda by means of new pictures, and a periodical, The Germ, in which they could ventilate their opinions and doctrines.

It was with the idea of writing a journal for this magazine that during the summer Hunt and Rossetti made a tour in France and Belgium, and this journal was duly written, though later it was considered too personal to be published in The Germ. In their judgments of the pictures they saw abroad the young artists were terribly severe. Van Eyck and the early Flemings they admired intensely, but the works of the later painters from Rembrandt to Rubens were dismissed in two words as ‘filthy slosh’.

After what they had seen abroad they held more firmly than ever before that it was not enough for a picture to be correctly drawn and well painted, it must also enshrine a worthy idea. In accordance with this doctrine, now added to the rules of the Brotherhood, Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti all chose serious subjects for the pictures they intended to exhibit in 1850. Hunt painted ‘An Early Christian Missionary escaping from Druids,’ Millais his famous ‘Christ in the House of His Parents,’ and Rossetti ‘The Annunciation’ or ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini’ as it was originally called. Curiously enough Rossetti, who in the previous year had been the most, was now the least Pre-Raphaelite of the three. His strangely beautiful work is not a vision of things seen, but a reverie, the romantic rendering of a mood. Again his sister Christina sat for the Virgin, and Thomas Woolner posed for the head of the Archangel.

Millais, on the other hand, had now thoroughly grasped the principle of Pre-Raphaelitism, and no longer giving a clever imitation of an Italian Primitive, he outdid Hunt himself in the thoroughness with which each detail in his picture was studied from Nature. In order to get absolute truth, Millais took his canvas to a carpenter’s shop to paint the details; he painted the figure of Joseph from the carpenter because that was, he said, ‘the only way to get the development of the muscles right.’ He was not able to get sheep, but he purchased two sheep’s heads from a butcher and painted the flock from them; and it will be observed that the sheep in the picture only show their heads, the bodies being tactfully concealed by wickerwork.

The Pre-Raphaelites (continued)