The Pre-Raphaelites

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

3

Meanwhile Rossetti had been treading another path, forsaking the naturalism of Holman Hunt, but avoiding the anecdotal triviality that tempted Millais; his pictures became more and more dream-like in their imaginative aloofness from life. The popularity that Millais courted was shunned by Rossetti, who, relying on the patronage of Ruskin and other admirers, ceased to exhibit his pictures except in his own studio.

In 1857 Rossetti went to Oxford with the intention of executing wall-paintings in the Debating Hall of the Union Society, and there he gathered round him a brilliant band of pupils, chief among whom were two undergraduates from Exeter College, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98) Unfortunately the English climate is fatal to true fresco painting, but though the Oxford decorations rapidly perished, and today are hardly visible, they remain historic as marking the starting-point of a new phase of Pre-Raphaelitism, in which the naturalist element was lost and its place taken by a more deliberately decorative and romantic medievalism. Of this new school Rossetti was as definitely the leader and inspirer as Holman Hunt had been of the original Brotherhood, and though for many years the pictures produced by Rossetti and his followers continued to be commonly described as ‘Pre-Raphaelite,’ it is now clear that their productions really had little to do with the original Pre-Raphaelitism, but formed part of what became known later as the ‘Aesthetic Movement.’

In 1862 Eleanor Siddal, who for ten years had been Rossetti’s model and constant inspiration, died, and at first the bereaved husband was so prostrated with grief that he was totally unfitted for work. But two years later he recommenced painting in oils, and reached the highest point in his ‘Lady Lilith’ of 1864, and ‘The Beloved,’ painted in 1865-6. Though nominally a subject from the Song of Solomon, this voluptuous presentation of feminine beauty, which for sheer loveliness rivals a Botticelli, is far removed from the simple and comparatively stern Bibilical paintings of the artist’s youth. The subject is clothed in the garb of medievalism, enveloped in the romance of fairy-tale, and heightened by a brilliance of color unsurpassed in the painter’s work.

Rossetti’s pictorial work may be divided into three periods, each of which is dominated by an ideal of womanhood derived from a living woman; in the first period she is his sister Christina, in the second his wife Eleanor Siddal, and the inspiration of the third was Mrs William Morris. Of the many pictures she inspired one of the most beautiful is ‘The Day-dream’ in the Ionides Collection at South Kensington, but though he painted her in many characters, he never painted Mrs Morris as Dante’s Beatrice. That character was sacred to his wife, and it was in memory of her that be began to paint in 1863—though it was not finished till much later—the ‘Beata Beatrix,’ now in the Tate Gallery. The picture, according to Rossetti, ‘is not intended at all to represent death, but to render it under the semblance of a trance, in which Beatrice, seated at a balcony overlooking the city (Florence), is suddenly rapt from earth to heaven.’

Rossetti died at Birchington in 1882, but his ideals were faithfully carried on by the most celebrated of his pupils, Edward Burne-Jones, who had been intended for the Church, but after meeting Rossetti at Oxford felt he must be a painter. One great difference between their pictures lay in their different ideals of womanhood, for while the women of Rossetti were full-blooded and passionate, those of Burne-Jones were of so refined a spirituality that to many people they appear anaemic.Otherwise the paintings of Burne-Jones are as remote from naturalism as the later works of Rossetti; he also gives us dream pictures of an imaginary medievalism; and while Rossetti, as became his Italian descent, found his ideal in the Florence of Dante’s time, the Welshman Burne-Jones fittingly found his in the legendary court of King Arthur. Both, however, were inspired by the same feeling for chivalry and romance, and the distance that had been traveled from Holman Hunt’s naturalism may be traced in the famous confession of Burne-Jones that he longed to paint ‘the light that never was on sea or land.’

In 1884 he exhibited one of his best known and most popular works, ‘King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid,’ at the Grosvenor Gallery, and two years later, at the age of fifty thrree, he was tardily elected A.R.A, but he was never much in sympathy with the Academy, seldom exhibited there, and in 1893, five years before he died, he resigned his Associateship.

In addition to his pictures and water colors, Burne-Jones designed a number of tapestries and stained-glass windows for his lifelong friend William Morris, whose unbounded artistic energy found more congenial occupation in reviving crafts than in practising painting. In Morris the medievalism of Rossetti found a furiously eager and thoroughgoing exponent, and though many of his ideas were unpractical, his inauguration of the Arts and Crafts Society was one of the most fruitful art movements of the Victorian era, and to him more than to any other man we owe not only the revival of tapestry and stained glass but a great improvement on fine printing, in furniture, pottery, wall papers, and interior decoration generally.

Holman Hunt, the eldest of the Pre-Raphaelites, survived them all, and after painting a series of sacred pictures unique in English art for their religious fervor and geographical exactitude, he died in September 1910 at the great age of eighty three.