The Pre-Raphaelites

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

This shower of vituperation affected the fortunes of the brethren, and Woolner, who had unsuccessfully competed for a commission to execute a Wordsworth Memorial, abandoned sculpture for a time and set sail for the gold diggings in Australia. There eventually he returned to sculpture, and in later years he had a modest success in Australia and England with his portrait busts. Holman Hunt, who could not lean on his parents, as Millais and Rosetti could, had a desperate struggle with poverty, and was compelled to take on the job of washing and restoring the wall paintings by Rigaud (1659-1743) at Trinity House. Stephens was employed with Hunt on this work, and William Rossetti got a place in the Inland Revenue Office. Millais, though the most abused, was the best off of the band, for a dealer named Farrer had the courage to pay him £150 for his picture and showed his faith in the artist by pasting all the adverse criticisms on the back of the canvas. Late in the year a purchaser was found also for the picture by Hunt, who then abandoned his restoration, and set to work on his splendid picture ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ now in the Birmingham Art Gallery. Millais at the same time began painting his ‘Woodman’s Daughter’, and in these pictures the artists obtained a greater brilliancy of color than they had yet secured by painting upon a wet white ground. They prided themselves on having rediscovered one of the secrets of the early Italian masters, and later on Hunt communicated the ‘secret’ to Madox Brown, whose pictures certainly gained much in luminosity and brightness of color immediately after 1851.

Rosetti had begun an oil painting of a subject from one of Browning’s poems, but he did not get it finished, so that Millais and Hunt alone had to sustain the renewed attack which was made when their pictures were exhibited in the Academy of 1851. In addition to ‘The Woodman’s Daughter,’ Millais exhibited ‘Mariana, or the Moated Grange’ and ‘The Return of the Dove to the Ark,’ and again he and Hunt were told that their paintings were ‘offensive and absurd productions,’ displaying nothing but ‘puerility,’ ‘uppishness,’ and ‘morbid infatuation.’ This year, however, they were not without defenders. William Rossetti had begun his career as an art critic and upheld Pre-Raphaelite aims and ideals in the columns of the Spectator. Still more important were two letters of chivalrous and whole-hearted appreciation which appeared in The Times, signed by ‘An Oxford Graduate,’ and everybody knew that the writer was the great John Ruskin. In the same year appeared a new volume of Modern Painters, in which Ruskin wrote of Millais and Homan Hunt:

Their works are, in finish of drawing and splendour of color, the best work in the Royal Academy, and I have great hope that they may become the foundation of a more earnest and able school of art than we have seen for centuries.

It is difficult to exaggerate the revulsion of feeling produced by Ruskin’s prouncements, for at that time he was almost a dictator of taste in England. Slowly the tide began to turn in favor of the brethren, but it was very nearly too late for Hunt. His picture returned to him unsold from the Academy, he was absolutely penniless and had nothing to tide him over until better times; indeed, he was on the point of abandoning painting and seeking his fortune as a sheep farmer in Australia when Millais and his parents came to the rescue. Millais ahd made a little money, and with his parent’s consent, he gave it to his comrade in order that he might make one more attempt. This generous help bound the two ‘Brothers’ still more closely together, and they spent the late summer and early autumn in the country near Surbiton, searching and backwaters of Thames to find just the right background for the picture of ‘Ophelia’, which Millais had decided to paint, and studying the meadows for the scene of Hunt’s crucial picture ‘The Hireling Shepherd’. But Hunt did not have to wait till this, perhaps his most perfect picture, was finished and exhibited before learning that the tide was turning; for while he and Millais were painting in the fields a letter was brought then announcing that the Liverpool Academy had awarded a prize of £50 to the painter of ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona.’

The Pre-Raphaelites (continued)