THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD.
The Revolt from the Raphaelesque—Influence of Keats and the Romantic
Poets—The Pre-Raphaelite Brothers and their Early Work—Travels of
Rossetti with Hunt—Publication of “The Germ”—Hunt and Millais in the
Royal Academy—Ruskin’s Letters to the “Times”—Pre-Raphaelitism at
Liverpool—The Pre-Raphaelites as Colourists.
The impulse thus given by Ruskin, in the minds of the young painters,
towards the larger spiritual life and vision of the Pre-Raphaelite
period, was strengthened, as Mr. Holman Hunt has told us, by the almost
accidental sight of a book of engravings from the frescoes in the Campo
Santo at Pisa, which fell into the hands of Rossetti and his friends
while spending an evening together at Millais’s house. To such aspirants
as they, “crying bitterly unto the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule
and create,” the work of the early Italian masters here set forth,
though already partially known to them in the National Gallery, opened
up a new world to be conquered and explored. In the suggestive rather
than successful achievements of Cimabue, Giotto, Ghiberti, and Masaccio,
they discerned the wealth of _thought_ to which Ruskin had directed
them, though the _language_ was still in the course of adjustment to the
meaning within. One cannot but think with a half-amused tenderness of
the eager experimentalism of the young schismatics, shaking off from
their feet the dust of academic propriety, and wandering back, half in
jest, half in earnest, in the buoyant prowess of their youth, to the
free fields wherefrom
—“the harvest long ago
Was reaped and garnered in the ancient barns.”
It is a pleasant picture which rises in the memory, of the diverse trio,
destined in after years for widely different paths of effort and
success, yet welded at first in the glow of a common enthusiasm of
revolt. It was impossible that they should perceive, at this early age,
that the reaction in which they were united was but a preparing of the
way for an artistic reconstruction which would demand from its leaders
congruity of ideal as well as community of protest. The principle of
non-conformity may embrace almost opposite poles of doctrine and
practice, but the positive elements of a faith must possess alike the
minds of its prophets if they are to pursue in permanent fellowship the
goal at which they aim. As George Eliot has said, “If men are to be
welded together in the glow of a transient feeling, they must be made of
metal that will mix, else they will inevitably fall asunder when the
heat dies out.”
But there was as yet a strong practical cohesion between the grave and
gentle Hunt, the brilliant, warm-hearted, and impressionable Millais,
and the ardent, mercurial, and passionately imaginative Rossetti, whose
personal magnetism was the immediate welding-force of the Pre-Raphaelite
movement. Rossetti’s proselytizing powers, and his inexhaustible
enthusiasm (at least in youth) for dogmatic propaganda, were indeed a
source of some embarrassment and many disappointments in the progress of
artistic reform. The doctrine of Pre-Raphaelitism, however, if we may so
call it—namely that in the age preceding Raphael would be found the
touchstone of art, grew up too imperceptibly through mutual influences
and interchange of thought to be attributed as a special tenet to
Rossetti or any other of the student-band.
It was in the year 1847, before the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, that the spell of Keats had come with special power upon
its future leaders. Rossetti, an omnivorous reader of poetry, had
already perceived both in Keats and Coleridge the essential elements of
the highest romance. It is the more remarkable that Chatterton, now
acclaimed as the herald of the romantic revival in poetry, as was Blake
in art, had no such charm for Rossetti until quite late in life, when
the tardy discovery led to an exaggerated worship. But in Keats, whose
life (by Lord Houghton) Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and Millais had been
reading together about this time, they found the supreme example in
English poetry of that attainment of harmony between the classic and the
romantic temper which was their aim in art. Eager as they now were for
subject-matter whereon to exercise the artistic principles as yet but
crudely formulated in their minds, they turned with new delight to the
wonder-world revealed to them by the spirit of Keats, and looked with
him through
—“magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faëry lands forlorn.”
They saw that the reconciliation of the flesh to the spirit, which is
the task of the second Renaissance as of the first, had already been
achieved in poetry, and was waiting its translation into pictorial art.
Keats had attained that perfect blending of the Greek spirit with the
temper of romance which Rossetti was to reach in “Venus Astarte” and
“Pandora.”
The first organized union of workers imbued with the Pre-Raphaelite
ideal, and further knit together by a common enthusiasm for the poetry
of Keats, appears to have taken the form of a cyclographic society, in
which the dominant spirits—Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt—were soon
surrounded by a group of more or less gifted companions and friends. The
members were pledged to contribute original drawings in regular
succession to a portfolio which was passed round for criticism by their
fellows. Rossetti, who liked to rule his little kingdom with an absolute
sway, seldom disputed by those who deemed submission to his imperious
ways but a small price to pay for his friendship, selected from Keats’s
“Isabella” the following series of subjects to exercise the talents of
the society:—1. “The Lovers;” 2. “The Brothers” (of Isabella); 3.“Good-
bye,” (the parting of Isabella and Lorenzo); 4. “The Vision” (Isabella
sees in a dream the murder of her lover by her brother); 5. “The Wood”
(Isabella visits the scene of the crime and secretly bears away the head
of her lover); 6. “The Pot of Basil” (she buries the head in her flower-
pot); 7. “The Brothers discover the Pot;” 8. “Madness of Isabella.”
It does not appear that any member executed this exhaustive series of
proposed sketches in its entirety. The suggestion of subjects from
Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” seems to have been no less barren of
results. The only drawings from Rossetti’s hand that remain to us from
that portfolio are an illustration of Keats’s “Belle Dame sans Merci;” a
study from Coleridge’s “Genevieve,” over which he sat up a whole night,
completing it at daybreak, and a sketch of “Gretchen in the Chapel” from
Goethe’s “Faust.” The society included Walter Howell Deverell, an artist
of rare delicacy and grace, and a man of singular personal charm,
destined to play a memorable part in the life-history of Rossetti; F.G.
Stephens, an intimate friend of Holman Hunt; Thomas Woolner, a young
sculptor whose acquaintance Rossetti had made at the Academy Schools;
J.A. Vinter, now well known as a portrait painter; and such lesser
though by no means insignificant lights as J.B. Keene, F. Watkins,
William Dennis, John Hancock, J.T. Clifton, and N.E. Green. It was
evident that among the rising generation of painters, long before the
formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,—even before Hunt or
Rossetti had entered definitely upon such art training as they ever had—
the revolt against the tyranny of the Academy was already begun, and
even those least in sympathy with the Pre-Raphaelite idea found
themselves drawn towards Rossetti and his friends in a common
disaffection with the existing _régime_. Moreover, the success of
Millais, who at the age of seventeen had gained the highest academic
prize for historical painting, and was already earning well with his
book-illustrations in black and white, afforded a valuable connecting-
link with a larger circle of critics and sympathizers from whom were
drawn some of the most faithful aides-de-camp of the Pre-Raphaelite
campaign.
The poetry of Keats afforded at all events an inexhaustable treasure-
house of subject-matter for the young painters, not only in their first
efforts towards the romantic revival, but for many years then to come.
“The Eve of St. Agnes,” for example, afterwards yielded the theme of the
picture regarded by some critics as Millais’s greatest work, as well as
of the first important painting by Holman Hunt, “The Flight of Madeline
and Porphyro.” This was completed at Millais’s studio, at his home in
Gower Street, early in 1848, and exhibited in the Royal Academy of that
year; Millais having been at work meanwhile upon his “Cymon and
Iphigenia.”
It was not until the autumn of 1848 that a definite attempt was made to
band together, in a common purpose and under a distinctive name, those
of the little company of students and friends who were prepared to
accept and follow openly the principle of fidelity to Nature in general
and to the romantic conception of Nature in particular,—the conception,
namely, of the physical world as the veil and vehicle of an immanent
spirit, fateful, mysterious, and occult. An informal meeting was held at
Rossetti’s studio, then at 83, Newman Street, and seven members enrolled
themselves under the name of “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.” The union
consisted of Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt, William Michael Rossetti,
the younger brother of the painter, Thomas Woolner, F.G. Stephens, and
James Collinson—the least stable of the Brotherhood and the first
seceder from its ranks. In the Academy of that year a picture by
Collinson had already been exhibited, entitled “The Charity Boy’s
Début.” He was a painter of uncertain artistic _calibre_, and of a
lethargic and mystical temperament; converted to Pre-Raphaelitism by the
ardour of Rossetti, but shortly forsaking his art studies and joining
the Roman Catholic communion with a view of qualifying for the
priesthood. This ambition also was subsequently given up, and, thus
vacillating between the church and the studio, his probation ended in no
particular career. The remaining members of the Brotherhood—apart from
the leading painters—may be said to represent the minor literature of
the movement. F.G. Stephens and W.M. Rossetti have attained permanent
distinction as art-critics, while Thomas Woolner, before winning his
later fame as a sculptor, gave in the form of poetry his chief
contribution to the early propaganda of the Brotherhood.
The rules laid down as to method in painting,—such as, that every
subject and accessory should be studied direct from nature, and from one
model—do not seem to have been stringently enforced: indeed in one of
Rossetti’s most rigidly Pre-Raphaelite pictures, “Ecce Ancilla Domini,”
the face of the Virgin was avowedly painted from several models, while
in that of the Angel the artist has produced a curious blending of his
brother’s features with those of another sitter.
It is improbable that an aversion to the one-model rule, which has been
attributed to Ford Madox Brown as a reason for holding aloof from the
Brotherhood, had very much to do with his decision to remain independent
of it. Mr. Madox Brown was from the first in cordial sympathy with the
movement, and on terms of intimate friendship with its leaders, but he
foresaw the dangers of an artistic clique, and, perhaps, the
impossibility of permanent consonance of method between temperaments so
diverse as those of the seven members enlisted. Nor was his own strong
and individualistic style of painting quite in harmony with the manner
of his younger friends. He was pre-eminently an historical painter; and
the critical and romantic treatment of history, though bordering very
closely on Pre-Raphaelite ground, hardly came within the immediate scope
of the Brotherhood. Though frequently acknowledged by his later critics
as the father—or sometimes the grandfather—of the Pre-Raphaelite
movement, Mr. Madox Brown consistently disclaimed any such title, and
did so with no less justice than modesty. At the same time, his work was
so intimately connected with that of the men whom he powerfully
influenced and inspired that it may fairly be studied side by side with
theirs in illustration of the dominant principles common to all.
In the autumn of 1848 it was agreed that the three chief painters should
select their next subjects from Keats’s “Isabella.” Millais, at that
time under the influence of Hunt rather than of Rossetti (who indeed was
still far from adopting any definite line of _technique_), decided upon
a scene depicting Lorenzo at supper with Isabella and her brothers. The
pensive and earnest face of Lorenzo was painted from W.M. Rossetti. Mrs.
Hodgkinson, the wife of Millais’s half-brother, sat for Isabella. It
would not be easy to disprove Holman Hunt’s generous but weighty verdict
on the finished picture, as “the most wonderful painting that any youth
still under twenty years of age ever did in the world.”
Hunt and Rossetti, however, were not so steadfast in their adhesion to
the agreement as to the choice of subjects from Keats. Hunt indeed
planned, and probably commenced about this time, his afterwards notable
picture, “Isabella and the Pot of Basil;” but this, though taking rank
among the best examples of his earlier style, was not finally painted
until 1867. He decided to finish, for the next Academy, a picture
already in hand, “Rienzi swearing revenge over the body of his brother.”
In this design the figure of Colonna, who endeavours to pacify the
would-be avenger, was painted from W.M. Rossetti, while Dante Rossetti
sat for the head of Rienzi,—and neglected, in spite of much urging from
his comrades, to fulfil his own share in the “Isabella” project; but
pursued work upon the most original and remarkable of his early
pictures, “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin.” Prior to this, he had proposed,
and partly sketched, a design entitled, “Retro me, Sathana,”
representing a young girl walking, and earnestly reading, in a cloister,
in the company of a venerable priest, while the retreating figure of
Satan threatens her from the shade. This conception was never carried
out; but it is probable that the now familiar sonnet bearing the same
title was written about this time. The only painting of any note
hitherto accomplished by Rossetti was a life-size and nearly half-length
portrait of his father, finished in this same year 1848, and
commissioned and bought by his godfather, Mr. Charles Lyell, of
Kinnordy, Forfar, the father of the eminent geologist. This was the only
male portrait Rossetti ever did in oils. In his new picture, “The
Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” (called at first “The Education of the
Virgin”) the face of the lovely child-angel was painted from a young
half-sister of Woolner (though greatly modified, if not wholly re-
painted, afterwards); while St. Joiachim was taken from an old family
servant, and Saint Anna and St. Mary from Mrs. Rossetti and Miss
Christina Rossetti respectively.
In the spring of 1849 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood held their first
“private view” with three important pictures, Rossetti’s “Girlhood,”
Hunt’s “Rienzi,” and Millais’s “Lorenzo and Isabella,” duly signed and
monogramed with the initials P.R.B. after the painters’ names, ready for
exhibition; the first appearing at the Free Gallery (formerly known as
the Chinese Gallery), Hyde Park Corner, then under the management of the
Association for Promoting the Free Exhibition of Modern Art, the other
two at the Royal Academy, where they were favourably hung. Rossetti’s
picture was sold to the Marchioness of Bath on “private view” day for
£80, and Hunt’s “Rienzi” found a purchaser soon afterwards. “Lorenzo and
Isabella,” sold for £100 in 1849, was bought in 1883 by the Corporation
of Liverpool for £1,120.
A tour on the Continent with Holman Hunt in September, 1849, gave
Rossetti fresh inspiration from the early Italian masters and the best
representatives of the Dutch school. The impressions made upon him in
his twenty-first year by travel in France and Belgium are recorded for
us in the wonderfully vivid and sharply-cut vignette-poems of this
period. Eager as ever for emotional experience, and with the divine
passion of hero-worship strong upon him, his holiday among the great
painters was a delightsome pilgrimage, full of suggestion and stimulus
for future work. In Paris, the sight of Giorgione’s great idyll in the
Louvre, “A Venetian Pastoral,” drew from the young tourist a sonnet
unsurpassed for sheer verbal colour and atmosphere by any of his later
poems. Here, too, were written the great memorial sonnets, “Place de la
Bastille,” and “The Staircase of Notre Dame.” On the cliffs at Boulogne
Rossetti wrote “Sea-Limits.” He
—“climbed the stair in Antwerp church,
What time the circling thews of sound
At sunset seem to heave it round.
Far up, the carillon did search
The wind, and the birds came to perch
Far under, where the gables wound.”
Van Eyck and Memmeling at Bruges, Leonardo, Fra Angelico, Giorgione, and
Titian in Paris, lacked no due meed of homage from Rossetti and Hunt.
It is remarkable that Rossetti never visited Italy, nor even retained,
in later years, the patriotic sentiment which had so strongly pervaded
the home life of his boyhood.
On the return of the travellers to London, a new development was
proposed and accomplished in the public propaganda of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood. It was decided to issue a monthly magazine for the
promulgation of Pre-Raphaelite principles in painting and poetry.
Members and sympathizers met at Rossetti’s studio in Newman Street to
discuss the project, and decide upon the title and contents of the
manifesto. The suggestion of Mr. Cave Thomas was ultimately adopted,
that it should be called “The Germ.” The first number, extending to
forty-eight large octavo pages, illustrated with etchings, appeared in
January, 1850, published by Messrs. Aylott and Jones, of 8, Paternoster
Row. The primary tenet with regard to art was thus enunciated in the
preface: “The endeavour held in view throughout the writings on Art will
be to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of
nature.” It would be captious, perhaps, to argue, in the face of so
ingenuous an implication, that nature is not simple, but, alas!
infinitely and fatefully complex without and within; presenting to the
seer’s eye a tangled web of visible phenomena no less intricate than the
secret woof of destiny whose threads are the lives of men. To young
minds, as to a young world, the vision of nature broadly outlined in
generalities and clear with purpose is one of the fairest of illusions.
The sternest discipline of life is to discover chaos where we imagined
order and lucidity: to find interminable mazes and cross-roads for our
bewilderment where in the morning mirage we had seen a plain path, an
open road to the Ideal. Then we cry that Nature, and not ourself, is
altered: that “there hath passed away a glory from the earth.”
Happily, this disillusionment was yet far off in the future of the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood. In the preface to “The Germ,” a special claim
was made for poetry in its relation to the principles of simplicity of
expression already enforced in painting; and with better reason, since
painting must perforce speak exclusively by the representation of
visible things, while poetry reaches directly to their inner
significance. For while the painter strives so to order and depict the
phenomena around him as to arrive at some sort of moral simplicity in
the effect of his picture, the poet—if he be a seer—penetrates at once
to the spirit of his theme, and clothes it at his own will with symbolic
or dramatic expression. Hence the application of the Pre-Raphaelite
principle to the writing of poetry was even more fruitful than in
painting; and produced in modern English ballad and lyric verse, and
even in the best prose of our own generation, a swift and incisive
directness of touch, a broad and vivid clarity of impression, never so
fully effected in the pictorial medium.
The first literary _débutant_ in “The Germ” was Mr. Woolner, who
occupied the opening pages of the January number with two short poems
admirably illustrative, within their unpretentious scope and modest aim,
of that naïve simplicity in the handling of complexities—the eternal
childlikeness of pure romance—which is inherent in almost all great art.
“My Beautiful Lady” and “Of my Lady in Death” were accompanied by an
etching in two parts by Holman Hunt. Then followed an unsigned sonnet by
Ford Madox Brown, and a paper by Mr. J.L. Tupper on “The Subject in
Art.” Mr. Coventry Patmore contributed anonymously a poem called “The
Seasons,” and Mr. Tupper was also represented in verse. Criticism of
contemporary poetry was afforded by W.M. Rossetti’s paper on Arthur Hugh
Clough. The remaining pages were worthily filled by the two greatest
poets of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Dante Gabriel and Christina
Rossetti: the latter with “Dreamlands” and another short lyric, signed
“Ellen Alleyn,” the former with “My Sister’s Sleep,” a characteristic
example of his earliest manner, written in the then uncommon metre since
naturalized in our language by Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” and the
wonderful prose allegory “Hand and Soul.” This poem—as verily it should
be called, with its rich and haunting diction and its magical rhythm of
imagery—is almost the sole example of Rossetti’s strength in prose, only
paralleled by a similar composition, entitled “St. Agnes of
Intercession,” of a later date. “Hand and Soul” is largely
autobiographical in its narrative, being the story of a young art
student of Arezzo, named Chiaro dell’Erma, possessed by new and high
ideals of the painters mission, and stimulated to the better application
of his own talents by the success of a younger comrade,—as we may well
believe Rossetti to have been stirred and impelled by the progress of
the more studious and at the same time more fortunate Millais. The
speech of Chiaro in “Hand and Soul” may be taken as a declaration of
Rossetti’s artistic faith and principles at that period.
The second number of “The Germ,” though no less interesting and
significant in subject-matter, did not increase the scant support
accorded to the venture by the public at large; and since the expense of
such an issue was too heavy to be borne by the little band of young and
struggling aspirants responsible for its existence, the future of the
magazine had to be seriously reconsidered by the Brotherhood. Mr.
Tupper, however, to whose hands the printing had been entrusted, came to
the rescue, and gave “The Germ” a new lease of life under the title of
“Art and Poetry.” The change did not serve to commend the somewhat crude
propaganda to the mind of the British Philistine, and after the April
number the issue was reluctantly given up; but not until its pages had
glowed with the first fires, at least, of Rossetti’s noblest poetic
inspiration. Here first appeared “The Blessed Damozel,” for which we
might surely paraphrase the words of Holman Hunt on Millais, and call it
“the most wonderful poem that any youth still under twenty years of age
ever did in the world.” Here, too, were the lyric first-fruits of his
continental tour (if sonnets may, by elasticity of definition, be
included in lyric poetry), “The Carillon,” “From the Cliffs—Noon,”
afterwards called “Sea-Limits,” “Pax Vobis,” largely rewritten later and
entitled “World’s Worth,” and the sonnets on “A Virgin and Child,” “A
Marriage of St. Katherine,” “A Dance of Nymphs” (from Andrea Mantegna,
in the Louvre), “A Venetian Pastoral” (from Giorgione, in the Louvre),
and “Ruggiero and Angelica” (from the picture by Ingres).
Among other contents of “The Germ” and “Art and Poetry” may be mentioned
Ford Madox Brown’s paper on “The Structure of an Historical Picture,”
John Orchard’s “Dialogue on Art,” and Coventry Patmore’s “Criticism of
Macbeth.” Mr. F.G. Stephens wrote under the pseudonym of “John Seward,”
and the publication was edited by W.M. Rossetti, then twenty years of
age. Yet one more poet remains in the list of contributors, James
Collinson, whose somewhat desultory but genuinely imaginative lines,
“The Child Jesus: a record typical of the five sorrowful mysteries,”
together with an etching by the same hand, illustrate very markedly the
peculiar phase of religious symbolism, combined with half-ascetic, half-
æsthetic melancholy, upon which the Pre-Raphaelites were entering at
this period, and which remained with one, at least, of their leaders, as
a permanent and dominating element in the artistic work of a lifetime.
But while “The Germ” was speeding through its brief career, and
achieving at all events some sort of _apologia_ for the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, the leading band of painters were further expressing and
developing their principles on canvas. For the Royal Academy Exhibition
of 1850, Millais had prepared two pictures destined to draw down upon
himself the concentrated fury of that storm of vituperative criticism
from the public press which raged unabated for five years around the
work of the Brethren, and ultimately spent itself on their more or less
worthy disciples and successors. It is remarkable that the chief burden
of the abuse heaped upon the Pre-Raphaelites by the art censors of the
period should have been borne in the first instance by one, in some
respects the most brilliant of the band, who in after years departed
more entirely from his early principles in painting than any other
member of the Brotherhood, and gained thereby a far greater measure of
general popularity than has been won, or is likely to be won at present,
by any of his former comrades. Upon no example of Pre-Raphaelite work
were the diatribes of the press more scathing than upon Millais’s two
pictures of 1850, “Christ in the House of His Parents,” (often called
“The Carpenter’s Shop”), and “Ferdinand Lured by Ariel.” “Men who knew
nothing of art,” says a fellow-member of the Brotherhood, Mr. F.G.
Stephens, “reviled Millais because he was not of the art, artistic.
Dilettanti, who could not draw a fingertip, scolded one of the most
accomplished draughtsmen of the age because he delineated what he saw.
Cognoscenti, who could not paint, rebuked the most brilliant Gold Medal
student of the Royal Academy on account of his technical proceedings.
Critics of the most rigid views belaboured and shrieked at an original
genius, whose struggles and whose efforts they could not understand.
Intolerant and tyrannical commentators condemned the youth of twenty
because he dared to think for himself.... Intense and unflinching
fidelity to nature, ardent love for colour, and a rigid resolution to
paint the light of day as brightly as pigments could allow him, were
among the aims of Millais, who, following the principles he championed
with all his heart, found his models among his friends of English birth,
and failing Eastern types, employed all his skill on British materials,
relying on the really devout spirit in which he worked, and the poetic
quality of his design, to produce the effect desired. He was sorely
disappointed in this reliance.” No less sane a journal than Charles
Dickens’s “Household Words,” thus wrote on June 15:—“In coming before
this Holy Family you must discharge from your mind all religious
aspirations, all elevating thoughts, all tender, awful, sorrowful,
ennobling, sacred, graceful, or beautiful associations, and prepare
yourself for the lowest depth of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and
revolting. You behold the interior of a carpenter’s shop. In the
foreground is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy in a
bed-gown, and at his side a kneeling woman so horrible in her ugliness
that 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. The two
almost naked carpenters might be undressed in any hospital where dirty
drunkards in a high state of varicose veins are received. Their very
toes have walked out of St. Giles’s.” Another writer likened the figure
of the boy Christ, whose hand, in the picture, has been wounded at his
task, to “a miserable child scratching itself against a rusty nail in
Seven Dials.” To such criticism it might easily be retorted that the
world is more deeply concerned to-day with the dark problems of Seven
Dials and St. Giles’s than with the life of any child in history, save
in so far as the latter may illumine and interpret the mysteries of the
importunate hour; and that the painter who so translates into present-
day life the eternal tragedy of toil and pain as to press home to the
conscience of a nation the daily re-crucifixion of the Christ in its own
vast labour-houses,—whose modern reading of the ancient tale suggests
the divine potentialities of all childhood and the universal pathos of
human love “wounded in the house of friends,”—has given us a greater
picture, and a more religious picture, than if he had painted for us all
the angels in Heaven.
“Ferdinand Lured by Ariel” may be taken as the first landscape produced
by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It was painted—according to the rule—
directly from nature. The background was taken from a spot in a park
attached to Shotover House, near Oxford, where Millais was staying as
the guest of Mr. Drury. A lady who saw the young artist at work upon
this subject distinctly recalls his application of a magnifying-glass to
the branch of a tree he was painting, in order to study closely the
veins of the leaves. This was a literal following of that patient
analysis of minutiæ in nature which characterized the Italian Pre-
Raphaelites, and is especially noticeable in the early landscapes of
Leonardo da Vinci; though he departed in his maturity from his former
love of detail, and began to conventionalize items into generalities.
Even the lizards in the foreground of “Ferdinand and Ariel” were
faithful portraits of certain small favourites brought by Millais from
Jersey to serve their turn among his sitters. The friend who sat for
Ferdinand relates that the painting of the face, though a marvel of
finish, and perfect in technique, was accomplished in a single sitting.
A detailed pencil drawing was already on the canvas, and the laying on
of the colour occupied only five hours. The vivid colouring of the whole
picture, and the use of metal instead of pigment for the gold-cloth worn
by Ferdinand (after the method of the early Italian masters, followed
also by Rossetti in “Ecce Ancilla Domini”), were the subject of scarcely
less vehement denunciation by the critics than the painter’s treatment
of the Holy Family. “We do not want,” they said, “to see Ariel and the
Spirits of the enchanted isle in the attitudes and shapes of green
goblins, or the gallant Ferdinand twisted like a posture-master by
Albrecht Dürer.... A Ferdinand of most ignoble physiognomy is being
lured by a pea-green monster, intended for Ariel, whilst a row of
sprites, such as it takes a Millais to devise, watch the operation with
turquoise eyes. It would occupy more room than the thing is worth to
expose all the absurdity and impertinence of this work.”
[Illustration:
“ECCE ANCILLA DOMINI!”
_From the National Gallery._
]
From such extravagance of hostility the efforts of Holman Hunt were
spared for the present; and his contribution to the Academy of 1850,
“Christian Priests Escaping from Druid Persecution” (better known as
“The Christian Missionary,”) though sharing in the general condemnation
of the Pre-Raphaelite “heresy and schism,” was not singled out for
special objurgation. Rossetti’s great achievement of the year was the
most beautiful, and at the same time the most dramatic, of his strictly
Pre-Raphaelite work, the “Ecce Ancilla Domini” (“The Annunciation,”) now
in the National Gallery. The first rough sketch for this picture—a small
water-colour not more than six inches by four—was painted as early as
1847 in the Cleveland Street studio shared with Hunt. The completed work
was rejected by the Academy, and seen only in the obscure little
Portland Gallery in Regent Street.
But the following season brought a larger measure of opprobrium to
Holman Hunt. In the autumn of 1850 he had spent some weeks with Rossetti
at Sevenoaks, Kent, and there painted the greater portion of his picture
for the next year’s Academy, “Valentine rescuing Sylvia from Proteus;” a
scene from Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” The beech-tree
forest background was painted in Lord Amherst’s park at Knowle, and Mr.
James Lennox Hannay (who died in 1873) was the model for Valentine. The
whole work was characterized by the same bold colouring and exuberance
of highly wrought detail, the same rugged unconventionality of pose and
gesture in the composition of the figures, that had so incensed the
organs of Academic tradition in the previous year. Its appearance in the
Academy of 1851 evoked a fresh outburst of official contumely, in which
the painter of “Valentine and Sylvia” (as it was ultimately called), was
no less severely dealt with than his comrade Millais, who exhibited at
the same time “The Return of the Dove to the Ark,” “Mariana of the
Moated Grange,” and “The Woodman’s Daughter”—one of the finest
combinations of Pre-Raphaelite landscape with the peculiar intensity of
figure-drawing and character-study which was a dominant motive with the
Brotherhood at this period. The assailant critics again sought to cover
insinuations of gracelessness and deformity of conception beneath the
looser charge of defective technique.
It was at this juncture that Mr. Ruskin, then personally unknown to the
Pre-Raphaelites, and hearing privately of their aims and endeavours
through Mr. Coventry Patmore, took upon himself to espouse their cause,
perhaps with more ardour than discrimination, and wrote, in the spring
of 1851, the now famous Letters to the “Times” which constituted the
first public and authoritative vindication of the Pre-Raphaelite
movement.
That Mr. Ruskin may have taken the early achievement and promise of the
young painters a little too seriously, and attributed to them a more
exalted conception of their mission as prophets and reformers than they
actually cherished, and that he did undoubtedly misinterpret certain
aspects of their religious paintings, is now widely acknowledged; nor
need we hesitate to say that his influence upon the movement from first
to last has been considerably exaggerated. Yet it is unquestionable that
the first inspiration of Pre-Raphaelitism was largely due to his
writings, and that his open championship of Hunt and Millais at a crisis
of popular feeling rendered immense service to their crusade against the
blind Philistinism of the British _bourgeoisie_. Replying at once to the
technical indictments, Mr. Ruskin said:—“There was not a single error in
perspective in three out of the four pictures in question [‘The
Woodman’s Daughter,’ ‘Mariana of the Moated Grange,’ ‘The Return of the
Dove to the Ark,’ and ‘Valentine and Sylvia’].... I doubt if, with the
exception of the pictures of David Roberts, there were one architectural
drawing in perspective on the walls of the Academy; I never met with but
two men in my life who knew enough of perspective to draw a Gothic arch
in a retiring plane, so that its lateral dimensions and curvatures might
be calculated to scale from the drawing. Our architects certainly do
not, and it was but the other day that, talking to one of the most
distinguished among them, I found he actually did not know how to draw a
circle in perspective.... There is not a single study of drapery in the
whole Academy, be it in large works or small, which for perfect truth,
power, and finish, could be compared with the black sleeve of Julia, or
with the velvet on the breast and the chain mail of Valentine, of Mr.
Hunt’s picture; or with the white draperies on the table of Mr.
Millais’s ‘Mariana.’ And further: that as studies both of drapery and of
every minor detail, there has been nothing in art so earnest or so
complete as these pictures since the days of Albrecht Dürer. This I
assert generally and fearlessly.” “Let us only look around at our
exhibitions,”—continued the writer, proceeding to compare the work of
the Pre-Raphaelites with the current standard of academic art—“and
behold the cattle-pieces, and sea-pieces, and fruit-pieces, and family-
pieces, the eternal brown cows in ditches, and white sails in squalls,
and sliced lemons in saucers, and foolish faces in simpers, and try and
feel what we are, and what we might have been.”
Mr. Ruskin’s letters to the “Times” were revised and republished a few
years later in pamphlet form, introduced by the following statement in
the preface:—“Eight years ago, in the close of the first volume of
‘Modern Painters,’ I ventured to give this advice to the young artists
of England: That they should go to Nature in all singleness of heart,
and walk with her, laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought
but how best to penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting
nothing, and scorning nothing: advice which, whether bad or good,
involved infinite labour and humiliation in the following it; and was
therefore, for the most part, rejected. It has, however, at last been
carried out, to the very letter, by a group of men who, for their
reward, have been assailed with the most scurrilous abuse which I ever
recollect seeing issue from the public press.”
Upon this endorsement of the Pre-Raphaelite aim there followed an
indictment of the Raphaelesque tradition still surviving in the
training-schools of British art, in a passage which, through much
quotation, has now become a familiar example of the controversial
literature of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. “We begin,” said Mr. Ruskin,
“in all probability, by telling the youth of fifteen or sixteen that
Nature is full of faults, and that he is to improve her; but that
Raphael is perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the better;
that after much copying of Raphael he is to try what he can do himself
in a Raphaelesque but yet original manner; that is to say, he is to try
to do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet this
clever something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules, is
to have a principal light, occupying one-seventh of its space, and a
principal shadow, occupying one-third of the same; that no two people’s
heads in the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the
personages represented are to possess ideal beauty of the highest order,
which ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly in
proportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and the
chin; but partly also in that degree of improvement which the youth of
sixteen is to bestow upon God’s work in general.”
It is not difficult to trace, in the light of those utterances, the
point of departure between Mr. Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites in their
conception of that universe of Nature which they had studied with the
like faithful care. Revolting from the quasi-perfection of Raphaelesque
art, Ruskin had thrown himself upon Nature with the confidence of
finding in her the absolute perfection vainly sought in the work of man.
He had embraced without question the monistic theory of Nature as
essentially beneficent and beautiful, and had never faced the principal
of dualism which has been and must yet remain the crux of modern
philosophy. Hence he failed to grasp the more romantic and subtle
conception of the physical world as the scene, and not the drama, of
life, which was immanent in the beginnings and revealed with the
maturity of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. It has been remarked by an
astute critic that three of the greatest writers of the Victorian age—
Ruskin, Carlyle, and Browning—have been ruined as thinkers by their
ignorance of the law of Evolution, with all that it implies of waste and
suffering, of sacrifice and conflict and loss. Ruskin’s philosophy of
nature was founded upon an old and discredited cosmogony; and however
remote may have been the thought of the Pre-Raphaelite painters from the
purely intellectual conclusions of physical and mental science in the
nineteenth century, however apart they may have lived from theological
and ethical controversy, it can safely be said that no contemporary
artist save Tennyson, in poetry or painting, has imbibed more completely
that spirit of mystical and irresponsible conflict with Nature which
they drew from the atmosphere of mediæval romance. They understood that
he who returns to Nature, returns, as another writer has bluntly
expressed it, to a great many ugly things. “We need,” says Mr. Frederic
Harrison, “as little think the natural world all beauty as think it all
horror. It is made up of loveliness and ghastliness, of harmony and
chaos, of agony, joy, life, death. The nature-worshippers are blind and
deaf to the waste and the shrieks which meet the seeker after truth.
What a mass there is in Nature which is appalling—almost maddening to
man, if we coolly resolve to look at all the facts, as facts!”[3] It was
well that the Pre-Raphaelite painters should return, as they did, to the
reverent and unbiassed portrayal of the natural world as it presented
itself to their eyes. That they should follow with absolute fidelity the
phenomena around them, “rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and
scorning nothing,” was the essential preparation for artistic reform.
But that they should advance from such a discipline to something of the
selectiveness of fine art, was a step from the analytic method to a
constructive effort based on that analysis and not—as in the
Raphaelesque convention—independent of it. In all the highest Pre-
Raphaelite work we feel instinctively that Nature is not the subject,
but only the accessory, of the painting. Undoubtedly the new note struck
in 1849 was, as Ruskin says, a note of resistance and defiance. But the
revolutionary impulse had yet to be developed on reconstructive lines;
and this development, though powerfully stimulated by the independent
genius of Millais in the first four years of the Brotherhood, passed
ultimately into the hands of Rossetti and Holman Hunt.
But Ruskin’s championship of Hunt and Millais when the powers of
orthodoxy were against them and their friends were few, and his no less
generous patronage of Rossetti in the succeeding years, did much to turn
the current of critical favour in the direction of the Pre-Raphaelite
ideal. Hunt’s picture, “Valentine and Sylvia,” after its merciless
ordeal of ridicule and abuse in London, was rewarded by a £50 prize at
the Academy of Liverpool,—the first English city to give public
recognition and support to the rising school. The story of the steadfast
encouragement accorded to the Pre-Raphaelites by the Liverpool Academy
during the next six years, in which the annual prize of £50 was granted
in every instance to pictures either by Millais, Holman Hunt, Ford Madox
Brown, or a painter of kindred aims—Mark Anthony,—and of the dissensions
which arose in and round the Academic Council when in 1857 the prize was
once more won by Millais, affords an interesting side light upon the
artistic controversy of the period. A leading literary newspaper
attacked the Liverpool Academy in the bitterest terms for what it called
“the Pre-Raphaelite heresy,” and Mr. Ruskin again came forward in the
press to the defence of the painters. In the following year another
nomination of Madox Brown by the Council for the award in question
brought the strife to a crisis; the Town Council withdrew its financial
support from the Academy, and rival exhibitions were opened, resulting
in failure on both sides. Time, however, worked a significant revenge.
Not long after the press attack upon the Academy Council, one of the
original members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Mr. F.G. Stephens,
was appointed art-critic of the very journal that had so violently
forsworn “the Pre-Raphaelite heresy.” Twenty years later, the finest
English art gallery outside London was erected in Liverpool through the
munificence of Mr. (afterwards Sir) A.B. Walker, recently deceased; and
yielded some of the most important spaces on its walls to pictures of
the highest level of the English Pre-Raphaelite school.
The history of the last two decades has indeed wrought a sufficient
vindication of the general methods of these young painters, and
supremely of their practice as colourists; and it is in the sphere of
the colourist that their influence upon contemporary art has made itself
felt more deeply, perhaps, than in any other branch of technique. But to
the vindication of history has been added in recent years, by the
painter most bitterly attacked at the time for his innovations in
colour—Sir John Millais—a defence which has now become almost an
aphorism in English studios. “_Time_ and _Varnish_ are two of the
greatest Old Masters,” says the artist, writing in 1888 under the title
“Some Thoughts on our Art of To-day”; “and their merits are too often
attributed by critics to the painters of the pictures they have toned
and mellowed. The great artists all painted in _bright_ colours, such as
it is the fashion now-a-days for men to decry as crude and vulgar, never
suspecting that what they applaud in those works is merely the result of
what they condemn in their contemporaries. The only way to judge of the
treasures which the old masters of whatever age have left us, is to look
at the work and ask oneself ‘What was that like when it was new?’ Take
the ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ in the National Gallery, with its splendid red
robe and its rich brown grass. You may rest assured that the painter of
that red robe never painted the grass brown. He saw the colour as it was
and painted it as it was—distinctly green; only it has faded with time
to its present beautiful mellow colour. Yet many men now-a-days will not
have a picture with green in it; some even going so far, in giving a
commission, as to stipulate that the canvas shall contain none of it.
But God Almighty has given us green, and you may depend upon it, it’s a
fine colour.”[4]
The writer then describes the gradual fall of Sir Joshua Reynolds before
the short-sighted demand for “subdued colour” which had become current
among the art _connoisseurs_ of his day, and which at last induced him,
against his better judgment, to create immediate “tone,” at the
sacrifice of durability, by the use of that pernicious medium,
asphaltum; with the result that all his extant work so accomplished is
now in a deplorable state of decomposition and ruin.
With such examples before them of the evil of yielding to the demands of
ignorance, and lowering in any way one’s standard of practice before a
popular cry, the Pre-Raphaelite Brothers, whose first word in art
sounded, as Ruskin said, the note of resistance and defiance, did not
scruple to make merry over the weaknesses of a school of painting
founded on Sir Joshua Reynold’s “Discourses.” Mr. Madox Brown tells us
how Rossetti loved to quote from the diary of B.R. Haydon:—“Locked my
door and dashed at my picture with a brush dripping with asphaltum.” But
of Rossetti’s cordial admiration for Haydon’s genius a contrasting
anecdote is evidence:—A friend, discussing with him the relative merits
of Haydon and Wilkie, contended that the head of Lazarus was the only
fine thing Haydon ever produced. “Ah!” burst out Rossetti, “but that one
head is worth all the puny Wilkie ever produced in his life!”
Rossetti’s practice, it may here be said, differed from that of his Pre-
Raphaelite comrades in the matter of varnish. The strong impulse towards
the fresco-method, which was initiated in him, in his student days, by
Madox Brown and the Westminster Cartoon competitions, resulted in his
avoidance, throughout the best years of his work, of glaze and sheen in
painting. From the first, Rossetti hated varnish: hence were developed
the fresco-like, pure, and lustreless depths of colour which mark his
finest technical level. But his entire confidence in the “Old Master,”
Time, to enhance and vindicate his rich green glories in drapery and
background is sufficiently attested by his unhesitating and masterly use
of green in nearly all his greatest pictures. Not even the verdant
gorgeousness of “Ferdinand and Ariel” can compare with the deep,
chastened splendour of the green in “Beata Beatrix” and “Mnemosyne,” or
in “The Beloved,” “Veronica Veronese,” “La Ghirlandata,” “The Blue
Bower,” or, more daring still, in the wonderful series of water-colours
which occupy the transition period of Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite work.
-----
Footnote 3:
“On Pantheism and Cosmic Emotion.”
Footnote 4:
“The Magazine of Art,” 1888.