Formed in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood — like the second-generation Romantic poets before them — was a group of ardent young men eager to break out of what they perceived to be staled artistic conventions. The PRB’s three founding members — John Everett Millias, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti — were jaded by the ideals embodied in High Renaissance painting, of which Raphael was the epitome. For over three hundred years these principals had dictated the nature of painting and art. The PRB wanted to change this — and the way to do so was with an artistic revolution.
BBC’s The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Revolutionaries tells this fascinating story. It’s a story of criticism and backlash, acceptance and influence, wealth and entrepreneurship. But more than anything it’s a story of constantly evolving ideas about art and society. As the Brotherhood developed their views throughout a boisterous five year period, they paved the way for other artists (and movements) to impart their own influence on the changing landscape of British art.
But none of it was inevitable. As the first of the three episodes in the documentary shows, the early days of the Brotherhood were filled with tremendous criticism. Their eventual fame and success came only after a period of deep rejection.
Indeed it was no less than Charles Dickens — echoing the sentiments of many — who excoriated a painting by John Everett Millais. This lambast of Dickens’s, even if a bit over the top, was understandable. Many of the guiding tenets of the PRB’s manifesto, including high realism, went sharply against the standards of the day, not least in the domain of religious painting. Dickens, then, was rightly shocked to see Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (1850).
The trend at the time — going back centuries — was an idealization of religious subject matter. Millais went completely against this. His painting shows Christ, Mary, and Joseph not as splendiferously beautiful and idealized figures, but as concrete, flesh and blood human beings. There is angularity rather than curves; coarseness rather than smoothness; bona fide details rather than immaculate appearance. And the overall representation aims vastly more towards realism than it does any kind of idealization.
All of this fit right in with one of the principles of the PRB’s manifesto: to paint religious subject matter with as much veracity as possible. Milliais and company eschewed idealized scenes; the Pre-Raphaelites in these early days were about capturing reality in an unadorned way.
In critiquing Millais’s painting, Dickens expressed his own utter revulsion while at the same time echoing sentiments of the time. But his stern reaction was to be far from the final word on the artistic merit of the Brotherhood.
John Ruskin, the pre-eminent (and trusted) art critic of the time, eventually spoke out in their favor, which helped stop the flow of vitriol coming from the press. As one scholar in the documentary puts it, “it was as if the gods had come down from the Olympian heights and bestowed benefaction on the Pre-Raphaelites.”
Ruskin’s backing — both in the press and as a patron — likely saved the PRB from being bound to their status as misguided and deplorable artists. They had, after all — in the eyes of the press — treated religious subject matter in a way that was crass and sacrilegious. And they had also boldly experimented with technique, composition, and subject matter. As regards the latter, Hunt, Millias, and Rossetti all painted scenes with down-and-out, lower class figures, such as prostitutes. Moreover, they portrayed them in a way that prompted viewers to assess them sympathetically and thoughtfully.
In capturing modern city life and its lower-rung subjects, the Brotherhood preceded the French Impressionists to this new manner of art. They also beat the Impressionists to plein-air painting — the act of painting outdoors, under the open sky, as opposed to inside from sketches.
These beautiful paintings done in this manner are the subject of the second episode. All of the works, whether by Ford Madox Brown (an unofficial member of the PRB), Millias, Hunt, or others, show nature in exquisite detail and with a kind of “scientific fidelity.” The level of care taken to capture nature all the way down to its most subtle and microscopic aspects is particularly evident in Hunt’s Our English Coasts and Brown’s An English Autumn Afternoon. The latter, which Brown worked on for three years, is, in the eyes of one scholar, “the most extraordinary Pre-Raphaelite painting of a landscape.”
With few exceptions, these outdoor paintings could not have been done without the newly expanded railway. The difficulty of transporting paints and reaching the countryside was made infinitely easier by this developing technology. And another mid-19th century trend also influenced the landscape paintings: a growing interest in natural history. Though this interest in geology, botany, and other areas captivated some of the Pre-Raphaelites more than others, the scientific currents of the time played a critical role in the PRB’s new approach to rendering nature.
But as magnificent and ground-breaking as many of these paintings were, the Pre-Raphaelites never worked exclusively in one domain for long, or allowed themselves to be defined by a single manner of art. They were versatile, passionate, and eager experimenters. They were also headstrong individuals who, although starting out as a close-knit group, had gradually begun to splinter. And by 1853, the group was effectively dissolved.
But it was not the end of the Pre-Raphaelites as individual artists. As entrepreneurship in Victorian England grew and flourished, Millias, Hunt, Rossetti, and the others, found themselves at the center of a changing world — one where new reproduction techniques, along with a demand for mass-marketed art, changed their lives in profound ways.
Whereas once the members of the PRB had been sharply castigated — and brought in little financial profit from their work — some of them now became immensely rich, not to mention famous. Hunt, who developed a relationship with the ambitious art dealer Ernest Gambart, was paid by Gambart an enormous sum of money for The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple. The 5,500 pounds, in fact, was “the highest amount ever paid to a living artist.” Hunt received another large sum of money for The Light of the World — a painting which, as it traveled around the globe, “would become the most viewed picture in the world.”
Commercialism was also profitable for the other two founding members of the PRB, Rossetti and Millias. Indeed the 1860’s brought all three of them considerable wealth, fame, and influence, along with the opportunity to venture into different areas, including book illustrations and, in the case of Millias, even a foray into the world of advertising.
This level of success and reception was a world away from their early days. The slings and arrows flung at them by the press in the late 40’s and start of the 50’s must have seemed like something in the remote past. Indeed it’s this incredible transformation of success that stands out most in this well-executed and fun documentary.
Spectatio 