The Pre-Raphaelites

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

By the time the Academy of 1850 opened the existence and doctrines of the Brotherhood had become more widely known, and this year there was no opportunity to complain of any want of public attention. The three pictures aroused a storm of criticism which fell with particular fury on the head of Millais. The true meaning of ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ was not very well understood, and the popular view was that a group of young painters had set themselves up to be ‘better than Raphael’ and deserved to be trounced for their vanity and impudence. And trounced they were. ‘Their ambition,’ wrote one newspaper critic, ‘is an unhealthy thirst which seeks notoriety by means of mere conceit. Abruptness, singularity, uncouthness, are the counters by which they play the game.’

The tile ‘The Carpenter’s Shop,’ by which Millais’s picture is now generally known, was contemptuously applied to it by enemies of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The artist originally exhibited it at the Academy with no other title than an extract from Zachariah (xiii.6):

And one shall unto Him, What are these wounds in Thine hands? Then He shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of My friends.

The very humanity which endears the picture to us today and makes it irresistibly winning was that time a cause of offence. Millais was accused of dragging down the Saviour to ‘the lowest of human levels, to the level of craving human pity and assistance.’ The picture was described as ‘a pictoral blasphemy’ from which right-minded people would ‘recoil with disgust and loathing.’ Even Charles Dickens took part in the general attack, and denounced the picture in Household Words as follows:

In the foreground of the carpenter’s shop is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering red-haired boy in a nightgown, who appears to have received a poke in the hand from the stick of another boy with whom he had been playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman so horrible in her ugliness that (supposing it were possible for a human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England.

Since the famous novelist’s abuse was directed far more at the persons than the painting, it is interesting to recall that the ‘blubbering boy’ was little Noel Humphreys, the son of an architect, while the ‘monster horrible in ugliness’ was Mrs Henry Hodgkinson. Not one of the people in the picture was painted from a professional model, and though the body of St Joseph is that of the carpenter the head is a portrait of the father of Millais.

The Pre-Raphaelites (continued)