PERIOD OF TRANSITION.
Influence of Browning and Tennyson—Comparison of Rossetti and Browning—
Influence of Dante—Introduction to Miss Siddal—Rossetti’s Water-
colours—Madox Brown and Romantic Realism—The Dispersal of the
Brotherhood—Departure of Woolner—Ideals of Portraiture—Rossetti and
Public Exhibitions—Death of Deverell—Rossetti’s Friendship with
Ruskin—Apostasy of Millais—The Rank and File of the Movement—
Relation to Foreign Schools.
While Millais and Holman Hunt were outwardly dominant in the region of
reform, and, in the exhibitions of 1850–51, were leading the Brotherhood
Militant boldly into the enemy’s camp, Rossetti was entering upon a
phase of doubt and perplexity, of self-distrust and hesitation, which
resolved itself into an important crisis in his artistic development. A
variety of circumstances diverted him in 1850 from the special line of
religious painting, exemplified in “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin” and
“Ecce Ancilla Domini,” which had been the chief outlet of his early
enthusiasms in art,—if indeed so inadequate a phrase be permissible in
regard to pictures which must rank with the purest products of his
genius in its pristine robustness and simplicity. An incident in the
studio-annals of the Brotherhood now turned him aside from the mediævo-
religious manner adopted directly and literally from the early Italian
masters. Rossetti’s convert and disciple, James Collinson, striving to
imitate afar off the sincere habit of his leader, set to work upon a
congruous subject, “The Renunciation of St. Elizabeth,” and produced a
picture so mystical in conception and so hysterical in sentiment, albeit
not without a certain grace and beauty of its own, that the sound and
practical good sense which tempered the mysticism of Rossetti revolted
at once from the extravagance of such a style. He now perceived the
danger of pursuing too exclusively a path bordering on the metaphysical
and occult, and quickly sought to brace and strengthen both his own
imagination and that of his comrade, by departing for a time from the
field of what is commonly called “sacred” art, and seeking fresh
inspirations in a less rarefied air.
Other influences, chiefly of a personal kind, began to play around
Rossetti at this time. He had moved, early in the year 1850, to a suite
of rooms at 14, Chatham Place, Blackfriars; a block of houses since
demolished, but then hospitable enough in a sober charm of environment;
within view of the river and the historic horizon of its shores, and of
certain grim but not wholly unromantic vistas of the great metropolis.
In this home was spent the happiest decade of Rossetti’s life. Here
began, soon after his settlement in the new abode, his friendship with
the greatest poet of the Victorian age, and with another conspicuous in
the second rank of its singers,—Tennyson and Browning,—both destined to
exercise a strong influence on Rossetti’s art, though (singularly as it
happened) not on his poetry; which remained, through years of
intellectual intercourse and the reading together of each other’s verse,
absolutely unaffected by either of the widely different poetic styles of
the then Laureate and his great contemporary.
It is not easy for a succeeding generation to understand with what
enthusiasm, with what delight and invigoration, the little company of
painter-poets plunged into the writings of Browning when, following
Rossetti, who was first on the track of the new fount of refreshment,
they discovered therein the tonic which they needed. No better antidote
to the sensuous mysticism into which some of the Pre-Raphaelites were
threatening to lapse could have been found than the wholesome modernity
and salutary brusquerie of the author of “Pauline” and “Bells and
Pomegranates.” It was probably because they stood most in need of his
gospel that the influence of Browning was at first more strong upon the
readers than that of Tennyson, who affected them in the direction of
pure romance, and distilled for them all that was sanest and noblest in
the mediæval world.
In the autumn of 1850 Rossetti began, during his stay with Hunt and F.G.
Stephens at Sevenoaks, a number of sketches with a view to a large and
elaborate picture of “Kate the Queen,” from Browning’s well-known lyric.
But he could never satisfy himself with the design, and after much toil,
disheartenment, and perplexity, the subject was abandoned, like many
more promising themes which from time to time inspired Rossetti. The
entire year, save for the success of “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” had been one
of disappointment to him, and of disconsolate struggles for a new
departure. He had made many futile attempts at designs for “The Germ,”
but none pleased him, and now he was casting about for new matter and
media. For, as his standard of excellence rose higher, he began to feel
more acutely his technical shortcomings,—the results partly of his
incomplete training and desultory study in youth, partly of singular
ill-luck in his figure-models, and partly also of a curious
constitutional deficiency—not of industry _per se_, but of the faculty
to direct and apply his industry along right lines. No modern artist has
disproved more completely than Rossetti the barren platitude which
defines genius as “the capacity for taking infinite pains.” Comparison
between Rossetti and Browning in their struggle with mental tendencies
unfavourable to lucid and well-ordered art is too obvious to demand
pursuit in detail. Both took the prescribed “infinite pains,” but
neither in the most profitable directions. Browning was over-charged
with thought; Rossetti with imagination; and both were cumbered with the
difficulties of artistic speech. The art of Browning has frequently been
pronounced crude, raw, and “undigested.” One would hesitate to apply
such terms to any work of Rossetti’s; for his, even at its most
elemental stages, generally erred in the direction of strained and
laboured purism, being over-wrought rather than unripe in conception or
performance. In both artists, an exuberant activity of output was
combined with a curious inability to undergo the full discipline of just
and coherent expression. Browning’s prolific and incorrigible chaos of
diction and metre, and Rossetti’s want of balance and sobriety in
draughtsmanship, are but instances of the too frequent impediments of
genius in the process of transmission. Rossetti, when he attained
perfection in technique—and that he did so absolutely and repeatedly can
no longer be questioned—seemed to stumble on it, as we have already
suggested, by a sort of exquisite chance, a divine surprise, rather than
a logical issue. And, manfully as he strove to recover in technical
science, and did indeed recover to a marvellous degree, the lost ground
of early days in a splendid maturity, his sense of perfect drawing was
too fine for him not to suffer keenly—so long as that sense remained
unimpaired—from that inability to realize at will his own ideals of
perfection, which to every true worker is the only thing to be called
failure.
Distracted as Rossetti was throughout his life by the very richness and
fertility of his own genius, torn ever between divided aims and
conflicting purposes, the more mutually obstructive because of the
restless and hyper-sensitive nature which was the field and victim of
their strife, the difficulty of concentrating that genius upon the
highest aim and purpose within its proper sphere was never more stubborn
than at this period. So largely did the poetic impulse, in his youth,
predominate over the pictorial method, that, as he himself declares in a
letter written in retrospect, it was not until 1853, when he was twenty-
five years of age, that he definitely adopted painting as his life-study
and profession, and relegated his literary efforts to a subordinate
place. Subordinate they were in name and for a time only: to be put
forth with fresh ardour and greater mastery at intervals of his
painting, and to surpass it in some respects in the essentials of fine
art. Rossetti had yet to learn that he, even more than Hunt and Millais,
was primarily and supremely a colourist in the broadest sense of the
word.
But a still deeper and more abiding influence from the literature of the
past was by this time ascendant in Rossetti’s mind. The love of Dante,
already inherent in him, was nurtured by many tender associations of
youth: it now increased and swayed him as a direct and urgent spiritual
power. In 1845 the vague spell of the old name upon the young namesake
had changed, for the latter, into an eager study of his great poetic
inheritance. The magic and majestic visions of the “Purgatorio” and
“Paradiso,” and still more, the unforgettable life-tragedy of their
seer, had sunk deeply into Rossetti’s thought, until, from his own
recreative alembic of fantasy, he began, about 1850, to bring them forth
again on paper and canvas, in a rich and profuse miscellany of rough
sketches and brilliant vignettes and colour-studies, too often left
unfinished at a point of high promise and alluring suggestions of
success.
It is not difficult to trace, through the strange parallels of
circumstance and destiny, the sombre charm that bound the exiled poet of
the fourteenth to him of the nineteenth century. It has been said that
no ascendancy of a great poetic personality over one born in a later age
has been more potent and fruitful in art than that of Dante Alighieri
over Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1849–50 we find the latter sketching,
first in ink and then in colours, the historic or legendary meeting of
Dante and Beatrice Portinari at a marriage feast, when Beatrice is said
to have laughed with her companions at the shyness and confusion of the
young patriot-guest. The second of these sketches was severely
criticised when exhibited in 1851–52, on account of a daring
juxtaposition of bright light green and bright light blue in the colour
scheme. This bold experiment was afterwards defended by Ruskin by
analogy with the natural disposition of green grass, etc., against a
summer sky.
It was at this time also that another new and important personal
influence came upon Rossetti’s life. James Collinson had now separated
from the Brotherhood, and was succeeded, at all events probationally, by
Walter Howell Deverell, through whom, by one of those strange chances
which sometimes modify in a moment the destinies of a lifetime, Rossetti
made the acquaintance of Miss Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal; a young girl of
such remarkable beauty that Deverell at once asked her to sit to him as
a model, and introduced her to Rossetti for the same purpose. The story
runs to the effect that Deverell, who was himself of singularly handsome
and winning presence, accidentally caught sight of Miss Siddal’s face,
with its regular, delicate features and profusion of rich, dark auburn
hair, in the background of a shop-window where she—the daughter of a
Sheffield cutler—was engaged as a milliner’s assistant. To Deverell,
being at that time in search of a model for his new picture, “Viola,”
from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” the sight of such a face was doubly
welcome. He quickly made such frank and honourable advances as his
graces of person and character facilitated, and Miss Siddal’s _début_ in
the studios of the Brotherhood brought not only to Deverell a perfect
Viola, but to Rossetti an ideal and actual Beatrice. For the young
artists soon found their model to be—in the old fairy-tale phrase—“as
good as she was beautiful.” Of that goodness and beauty, that
incomparable charm of talent and of character, of manner and
temperament, which soon made her the centre of the warmest admiration
and affection, enough has long since been written, by those who knew
her, to render the tardy praise of less qualified historians alike
needless and impertinent. The members of the Brotherhood vied with each
other in the endeavour to immortalize her in their paintings. Rossetti,
Hunt, and Millais did so with unqualified success. Rossetti, in his
turn, discovered that she herself possessed extraordinary aptitude for
art. He gave her lessons in drawing and painting, and the two worked
together upon kindred ideals. Her presence in the studios was soon upon
the footing of equal friendship and pleasant _cameraderie_. The vigour
of her imagination is best seen in a water-colour drawing, “Sir Patrick
Spens,” in Mr. Theodore Watts’s collection. It represents the wives of
the men on the doomed ship waiting in agonized expectancy upon the
shore.
Soon a different and deeper attachment sprang up between teacher and
pupil. Her exquisite spirit, her gracious ways, appealed as deeply to
Rossetti’s sensitive and passionate nature as did her beauty to his
æsthetic judgment. His love for her was as the gathering up of all the
scattered forces of his being into one consecrated worship. It may well
be that the progress of courtship was not invariably favourable to the
progress of art, but several rough portraits by Rossetti of himself and
Miss Siddal, and of Rossetti by his fair companion, remain as pleasant
witnesses of idle hours, and are at the same time drawn with singular
vividness and force.
Early in 1851, or perhaps at the close of the previous year, Miss Siddal
appears to have given sittings to Holman Hunt for the face of Sylvia in
his picture of “Valentine and Sylvia,” already referred to. Rossetti sat
with her as the Jester in Walter Deverell’s “Viola”—his most successful
picture; taken from the scene in which the Duke asks the Jester to “sing
again that antique song he sang last night.” The artist served as his
own model for the Duke.
It appears probable that Rossetti and Miss Siddal were engaged as early
as 1853, though the relationship was not openly avowed for a
considerable period, and did not terminate in marriage until 1860.
Rossetti’s pecuniary position, at the outset of his career, was
naturally uncertain; nor did it materially improve with subsequent
prosperity and fame; for his tastes and habits, according to the
traditions of artistic Bohemia, were as luxurious and improvident as his
earnings were precarious. Miss Siddal, too, was delicate in health. An
early sketch of her, from Rossetti’s hand, and now in the South
Kensington Museum, representing her as she stands by a window, in a gown
of quaint simplicity and soberness, gives perhaps the truest impression
of her personality that could be selected from the portraits of that
period. The artless and yet somewhat austere pose, the fragile grace and
slightly languid sweetness of aspect, afford a key to the criticism once
passed to the effect that “she would have been a Puritan if she had not
been an invalid.” The latter she never was in the sense of chronic
inactivity, but of such delicacy as to give a peculiar tenderness to her
service as a model, and unhappily both to delay and abbreviate the short
period of married life.
To some critics it has been a source of regret that Rossetti should have
come in youth so unreservedly under the spell of a type of beauty as
exclusive as that of this well-beloved model. The rare blending of
spiritual with sensuous charm which she presented in feature and
expression so fully satisfied his own ideal of that harmony as to make
him dwell upon, and perhaps specialize it, in a way which constituted a
danger to his art; inducing him to read into other feminine types the
individual characteristics of the one. Fortunate as he was in after life
in obtaining for his models some of the most beautiful and cultured
women in the artistic and literary circles of London, his tendency was
almost always to look at them, as it were, in the light of that
established ideal, and to conceive them as versions merely of that
elemental loveliness which so dominated his thought. But it was
inevitable that a temperament like Rossetti’s should specialize, through
their very intensity, the dominant characteristics most familiar to his
pencil and his brush. The case of Miss Herbert, an accomplished actress
who gave him a number of sittings in the next decade, is perhaps the
most striking exception to the rule; but her style of beauty was in too
complete a contrast to that of Miss Siddal (being of a severe, robust,
and Hellenic type) to allow of any compromise between the features of
the two.
The combined influence of Browning and Tennyson among contemporary
poets, and the increasing sway of Dante over the young painter,
inclining him the more strongly in the direction of historic romance,
produced, as we have seen, a somewhat desultory course of pen-and-ink
sketches and water-colour studies during the next few years. The
interval from 1850 to 1858 may be reckoned as Rossetti’s second period.
After the completion of “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” he painted no important
oil picture until the Llandaff “Triptych” of 1859, and the contemporary
“Bocca Baciata,” which stands first in point of time, and high in point
of merit, among the masterpieces of his maturity.
Yet the water-colours of the second period, capricious and experimental
in treatment as many of them are, include some of the most valuable,
because the most characteristic and significant, of Rossetti’s work in
the realm of pure romance. In these rough and often hasty sketches,
sometimes less than twelve by twenty inches in size, his imagination
seems to have been exercising itself upon the poetic subjects that
haunted him by turns with the vividness of actual life, more vital and
urgent than the realities of every day. Several, indeed, of the finest
of these water-colours are now dated, on good authority, as early as
1848–49; such as the lovely little sepia sketch, “The Sun may Shine and
we be cold,” given to his friend, Alexander Monro, a young Scottish
sculptor of high promise, whose early death from consumption removed an
artist who could ill be spared from the small and never very strong
sculpture-branch of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. To this period also
belong some of the most important of the Dante subjects. From 1849 is
dated “A Parable of Love,” one of the best of Rossetti’s early drawings
in pen and ink. The lady is seated at an easel on which she has been
painting her own portrait from a mirror at her side. Her lover, bending
over her from behind, lays his hand upon hers to guide the brush anew.
Mr. Woolner served as the model for the lover. A pen-drawing from
Browning’s “Sordello,” entitled “Taurello’s First Sight of Fortune,”
also belongs to 1849, together with the powerful little sketch, “The
Laboratory,” from the same poet, showing a strange, brilliant, witch-
like or almost serpent-like woman in an alchemist’s shop, procuring from
him some fateful elixir wherewith to play upon her rival and avenge
herself upon the lover, once her own.
One of the most beautiful water-colours of 1850 is the “Morning Music;”
a dainty little half-length figure of a white-clad girl seated at her
toilet, another maiden brushing her long bright hair, while her lover
stands, making music from some archaic instrument, at her side. At this
time also Rossetti made the first sketch of a subject which fascinated
him with peculiar force almost throughout his artistic career, and to
which he returned again and again in several media, even within a short
time of his death, but without ever achieving a finished picture—
“Michael Scott’s Wooing.”
In 1851 were made the best of several water-colour drawings from the
subject of “Lucretia Borgia,” and the first pen and pencil sketches of a
subject suggested by the famous Döppelgänger legends of northern Europe.
The design for “How they met themselves” remains among the very highest
of Rossetti’s conceptions in pure romance. The final pen-and-ink version
was not done till 1860, nor the water-colour till 1864. The subject
demands further study in a separate chapter, together with the principal
Dante sketches in this group. Several drawings from Shakespearean
subjects, including “Benedick and Beatrice” (“Much Ado about Nothing”)
and “Orlando and Adam in the Forest” (“As You Like It”), were also
executed about this time.
Mr. F.G. Stephens traces some interesting modifications of Rossetti’s
technique between the years 1850 and 1853 to the influence of his
comrades in the course of associated work. From Millais he seems to have
gained something of the easy grace and suavity of style which was
lacking in his first too strenuous work; from Holman Hunt, the
scrupulous and laboured detail which readily became as exhaustively (and
sometimes exhaustingly) symbolic as Hunt’s own; and from Ford Madox
Brown a certain robust breadth and dramatic mastery which was needed to
lift his subjective creations into a large and quickening atmosphere.
Probably it was the influence of Madox Brown that led him to the field
of stern and practical social problems, of everyday romance; to deal
with the eternally crucial relationship of frail womanhood to passionate
manhood, and all its sweet and bitter and profound significance upon the
life of humanity, as he dealt with it in the wonderful “Hesterna Rosa”
(“Yesterday’s Rose”) of 1851, in “The Gate of Memory” six years later,
and in the great realistic picture, “Found,” which was begun in 1852,
but which, after many vicissitudes of neglect, spasmodic effort, and
frequent despair, remained still unfinished at the painter’s death. It
may be wished that Rossetti had pursued more thoroughly the _motif_
which thus yielded some of the most remarkable and suggestive of his
designs. This group, however, again affords a subject for consideration
on a future page.
But the year 1853 saw also the first outward signs of the breaking-up of
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Thomas Woolner, the oldest member of the
Brotherhood, at this time twenty-eight years of age, being still unable
to earn a living in London by his art, now determined to emigrate to
Australia, where some friends of his family were already established at
Melbourne, and to try his luck at the gold-diggings, which were at that
time a source of much excitement and speculation in English circles.
Woolner had already achieved some unpretentious but exceedingly
thoughtful and conscientious work in sculpture, but he had not met with
much academic recognition, nor with any substantial favour from the art-
patronising public. For many years a pupil of Behnes, he entered the
Academy Schools in 1842, and contributed a large composition of life-
size figures representing “The Death of Boadicea” to the Westminster
Cartoon Competition of 1844. His contributions to the Royal Academy
exhibitions in Trafalgar Square had included “Eleanor Sucking the Poison
from the Wound of Prince Edward” (1843), “Alastor” (from Shelley, 1846),
“Feeding the Hungry” (bas-relief, 1847), “Eros and Euphrosyne” and “The
Rainbow” (1848), and portraits of Carlyle and Tennyson. At the British
Institution he had also exhibited a statuette of “Puck” (1847) and
“Titania Caressing the Indian Boy” (1848). He sailed for Australia in
the spring of 1853, accompanied by a promising young sculptor named
Bernhard Smith (who died somewhat prematurely in 1885), and followed
shortly afterwards by E.L. Bateman, another close sympathizer with Pre-
Raphaelite aims. Woolner returned to England early in 1857, and then
executed the fine bust of Tennyson recently placed in Poets’ Corner,
Westminster Abbey. His later work, however, can hardly be classed with
that of the Pre-Raphaelite band. He died on the 7th of October, 1892.
In the summer of the same year the Brethren agreed to paint together a
group of their own portraits, in order to send them over as a gift to
their distant comrade on the gold-fields of the Antipodes. Accordingly,
they met one day at Millais’s studio in Gower Street. There were present
Dante and W.M. Rossetti, F.G. Stephens, Millais, and Holman Hunt. Mr.
W.M. Rossetti, ranks the results in the following order of merit:—The
portrait of Stephens by Millais, of Millais by Hunt, of W.M. Rossetti by
Millais, of Dante Rossetti by Hunt, and of Hunt by Dante Rossetti.
Rossetti himself, as we have already seen, produced but very few male
portraits. The large oil-painting of his godfather, Mr. Charles Lyell,
and the pencil drawings of his father and grandfather; the water-colour
sketches of Browning and Swinburne, and the admirable life-size chalks
of Mr. Ruskin, Mr. Theodore Watts (said by Mr. Swinburne to be his
masterpiece in portraiture), Mr. F.R. Leyland, Dr. Gordon Hake, Mr.
George Hake, and Mr. W.J. Stillman, two or three pencil drawings of
Madox Brown, and the painting of Holman Hunt, as above recorded, seem to
exhaust the list of his efforts in that field, if we exclude the
consideration of many excellent likenesses which occur among his
_genre_-pictures. W.M. Rossetti, for instance, sat more than once to his
brother for the head of Dante, and many other important figures; in
fact, there was a general practice of mutual accommodation among the
Brothers in serving as models one to another.
Yet the immense influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement upon English
portraiture in the latter half of the nineteenth century would be
difficult to over-estimate. It must be remembered that the first
principle of Pre-Raphaelitism—namely, that nature, including human
nature, is to be painted truthfully and unflinchingly as it presents
itself to the painter’s eye—strikes directly at the root of the
conventional habit, which aimed at “idealizing” the subject into
something far superior to the present reality. Still, as “the eye sees
what it brings the power to see,” so the rightly-trained artist sees
infinitely more than the casual observer, and his purest realism becomes
the highest ideality. For in order to represent nature truly, something
more is demanded than imitation. Diderot tells a story of a painter well
known to him and to fame, who, on beginning work upon a new subject,
always went down upon his knees and prayed to be delivered from the
model. There was a grain of truth in his notion. To be delivered from
the letter in order to apprehend the spirit, yet to follow faithfully
the visible in order to attain the invisible, is the task of the
portrait-painter. The mistake of the pseudo-classic idealists, as of the
impractical folk in other walks of life, is to suppose that by aiming at
the spirit they are absolved from the letter altogether; not perceiving
that to gain the spirit they must reach _through_ the letter, and
_beyond_ it. Every true portrait-painter is an idealist in this highest
sense, that he perceives and reproduces the inmost and essential Self of
his sitter, and in supreme moments resolves, as Spinoza would have it,
the “potential human” into the “actual divine.” He portrays scrupulously
the outward aspect, but interprets the whole by that pervading spirit
from within to which the outward aspect has given him—as a seer—the key.
The face he paints is not transfigured by his own imagination, his own
conceit, however fair, of what that face might or ought to be; but it is
revealed in its own distinct and actual being by a witness which, if
truthful, must be as generous as stern. It is the immortal and
inevitable “Thou Thyself” of which Rossetti sings:
“I am Thyself—what hast thou done to me?
—And Thou Thyself to all eternity!”
Yet if we may risk a paradox, it is precisely in the _reality_ that
there lies the _potentiality_ of the life within; behind the physical
_is_ abides the spiritual _may be_; the “everlasting no” of the
uncompromising realist, sifting, limiting, and analyzing down the human
unit into bare and rigid matter, often conceals the hidden hope and
promise of the idealist’s “everlasting yea.” Hence a great portrait is
charged to the full with latent possibilities of character and destiny.
It suggests forces as well as phenomena, causes as well as effects,
inherent tendencies as well as facts. Someone has said that a human face
should be either a promise or a history. The definition is too narrow.
Every face, save perhaps in childhood, and not always with that
exception, contains both promise and history inextricably blended each
with each. A great portrait must be passionately personal, intensely
individual; presenting one single, complete, and separate identity to
the eye and mind, and yet in a very real sense _im_personal, having a
certain universal, humanitarian significance. For the artist’s hand sets
the human unit in its place in the great Family; lifts it on to the
broad planes of the world’s common life. As his eye sees all things,
like Spinoza, _sub specie eternitatis_—sees Time in the light of
Eternity—so it sees one Man in the light of Humanity. He knows no
isolations of being, conceives no man as “living to himself;” but is
concerned ever with relationships and imperative sympathies between the
subject of his portrait and the rest of mankind; so that the personality
that looks forth from his canvas, faithfully and profoundly interpreted
by his own, has in it the elements of appeal and challenge, and sends
out a radiance of vitality to its spiritual kin.
In this ideal of portraiture the young Pre-Raphaelites had been
confirmed by Ruskin long ago; and he had pointed them to the
incomparable portraits of Dante by Giotto, of Petrarch by Simon Memmi,
and of Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo, as examples among the Italian Pre-
Raphaelites of the attainment of such success. Rossetti and his comrades
in their turn, more especially some of the younger and more independent
spirits not actually or permanently connected with the Brotherhood,
developed and perfected the ideal to a degree incalculably fruitful in
contemporary art. It will hardly be disputed that in Mr. G.F. Watts, one
of the truest Pre-Raphaelites in aspiration and temper, though utterly
distinct from them in original genius and intellectual range, England
has found at last her greatest portrait painter, while to Millais, one
of the original members of the Brotherhood, the judgment of posterity
will attribute a scarcely less exalted place. They found the art of
portraiture degraded, almost without exception, to the lowest level of
trivial prettiness as regards women, and vulgar affectation in dealing
with men. “The system to be overthrown,” as Ruskin said, “was one of
which the main characteristic was the pursuit of beauty at the expense
of truth.” And such pursuit leads in all ages to the same inexorable
fatality,—the beauty so gained is always of a false and spurious kind.
The ancient allegory of Pandemos and Urania is for ever true in art. The
seeker for ideal beauty seeks it only in visible forms, pursues it
through the physical world alone, awaits it at the doors of sense
merely, and is straightway ensnared by the earthly Pandemos, the Venus
of the flesh. But let him steadfastly set his soul to the higher
worship, let him seek reverently the moral and spiritual loveliness of
human character in the great _is_ and the greater _may be_ of the
throbbing, actual life around him, and surely he will be brought into
the near presence of the heavenly Urania; surely he will pass, with
Rossetti, through “Body’s Beauty” to “Soul’s Beauty,” and worship with
him
—“that Lady Beauty in whose praise
Thy voice and hand shake still,—long known to thee
By flying hair and fluttering hem,—the beat
Following her daily of thy heart and feet,
How passionately and irretrievably,
In what fond flight, how many ways and days!”
The attention of Mr. Ruskin had meanwhile been diverted to some extent
from the work of Millais and Hunt by his entrance in 1854 upon a close
personal friendship with Rossetti, which lasted in cordial fidelity for
some ten or twelve years. At the time of his first public championship
of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Mr. Ruskin had known nothing of
Rossetti’s work, inasmuch as it had never yet appeared on the walls of
the Academy or in any of the popular exhibitions of the period. But, for
such unintentional and unconscious neglect of the real leader of the
movement which he so warmly endorsed, the great critic now made ample
reparation. He became a constant and generous patron of Rossetti’s
pictures until the painter passed, about the year 1865, into his third
artistic period, and developed methods less in accordance with Ruskin’s
especial tenets. That the gradual severance of intimacy between artist
and buyer should have been brought about by the former’s independence of
spirit and resolute adherence to his own inspirations and aims, in the
face of some, perhaps, over-officious criticism and counsel from his
patron, is certainly no discredit to Rossetti. At the same time, the
art-world owes a debt of gratitude to Mr. Ruskin for having so long
encouraged, by his support and sympathy, the production of those
exquisite water-colours which Rossetti, unsettled as he then was in
habits of painting, might not otherwise have accomplished in such
splendour and cogency during his transition period.
And to these years of intimacy with Ruskin belong nearly all the finest
drawings of his “Morte D’Arthur” series, such as “King Arthur’s Tomb”
(called sometimes “The Last Meeting of Launcelot and Guinevere,” though
the design by no means gives the impression of a meeting in the flesh),
“The Damozel of the Sanct Grael,” “The Chapel before the Lists,” “The
Meeting of Sir Tristram and Iseult,” “Sir Galahad in the Ruined Chapel,”
“Sir Galahad and Sir Bors,” “Launcelot Escaping from Guinevere’s
Chamber,” and “The Death of Breuse sans Pitié;” together with a fresh
and important group of Biblical subjects treated in a more daringly
romantic manner than before, including “The Passover in the Holy
Family,” “Bethlehem Gate,” “Ruth and Boaz,” “The Crucifixion,” “Mary in
the House of John,” and the first sketch for “Mary Magdalene at the Door
of Simon the Pharisee;” also the “Triptych” for the altar-piece of
Llandaff Cathedral, “The Infant Christ Adored by a Shepherd and a King.”
The Dante subjects again appear in 1854–55, with “Francesca di Rimini,”
“Paolo and Francesca,” “Matilda Gathering Flowers” (from the
“Purgatorio”), “Dante’s Vision of Rachel and Leah,” “Dante at Verona,”
and the first version of the picture afterwards among Rossetti’s
masterpieces, “Dante’s Dream.” The little drawings of “The Tune of the
Seven Towers” in 1850, “Carlisle Tower,” “Fra Angelico Painting,” and
“Giorgione Painting” in 1853, “The Queen’s Page” (from Heine) in 1854,
“Fra Pace” and “Monna Rosa” in 1856, “The Blue Closet,” “The Blue
Bower,” “The Bower Garden,” and the first design for a favourite subject
variously known as “Aurelia” and “Bonifazio’s” or “Fazio’s Mistress” in
1857; these, together with some further sketches for “La Belle Dame sans
Merci,” a number of portraits of Miss Siddal, Browning, Tennyson, and
Swinburne, whom he knew in 1857, are but a selection from the almost
countless studies, in pencil, pen and ink, neutral tint, water-colour,
and occasional oil, scattered over Rossetti’s transition period.
“MARY MAGDALENE AT THE DOOR OF SIMON THE PHARISEE.”
From a drawing.
_By permission of Lord Battersea and Overstrand._
[Illustration: Mary Magdalene]
“St. Luke the Painter,” in 1857, is notable as being Rossetti’s first
success in coloured chalk; a medium which he affected more freely in
after years, and with extraordinary power and felicity; the medium, in
fact, in which some of the noblest of his later half-length symbolic
figures were executed.
After the year 1850 Rossetti almost ceased to exhibit in picture
galleries. A very few of his pictures, including the “Bocca Baciata” and
a version of “Lucretia Borgia,” were thenceforth seen in the Hogarth
Club, a small society of artists and amateurs to which he belonged, and
others afterwards in the Arundel Club, which he joined in 1865. An
important exception, however, was made to this rule of seclusion in
1856, when a small but highly representative Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition
was opened at 4, Russell Place, Fitzroy Square. Among Rossetti’s
contributions were the first water-colour draft of “Dante’s Dream,”
already alluded to, and its pendant, “The Anniversary of the Death of
Beatrice,” “Hesterna Rosa,” “The Blue Closet,” and “Mary Magdalene.” The
other exhibitors were Millais, Holman Hunt, Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes,
Charles Collins, William Davis, W.L. Windus, Inchbold, Seddon and Brett.
The “Dante’s Dream” re-appeared at the Liverpool Academy in 1858,
together with “A Christmas Carol,” and “The Wedding of St. George”;
“Fair Rosamund,” and “The Farmer’s Daughter” (study for “Found”) went to
the Royal Scottish Academy in 1862; and “Mary in the House of John”
appeared at the Fine Art Society’s Galleries in 1879. A version of
“Pandora,” in 1877 or 1878, and a lovely little water-colour, “Spring,”
in 1879, were lent by their purchasers to the Glasgow Institute of Fine
Arts; “Tibullus’s Return to Delia” was similarly lent to the Albert
Gallery Exhibition at Edinburgh in 1877; and in 1881 the Loan Exhibition
at the Royal Manchester Institution included four important water-
colours—“Proserpine,” a “Lucretia Borgia,” “Hesterna Rosa,” and “Washing
Hands;” and five oils—“Proserpine,” “Two Mothers,” “Joli Cœur,” “A
Vision of Fiametta,” and “Water-Willow.” These instances complete the
brief list of Rossetti’s pictures exhibited in public galleries during
the lifetime of the artist.
In the year 1854, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, already practically
broken up by divergence of method in the leading painters, and changes
of aim and sphere among the lesser lights of the revolutionary dawn, may
be said to have been finally dispersed by the lamented death of Walter
Deverell, and the departure of Holman Hunt for a lengthy sojourn in the
East, there to paint directly from nature—according to the much boasted
but oft-broken rule—the backgrounds and appurtenances of those Biblical
subjects to which he was now strongly drawn. The death of Deverell at an
early age was a heavy personal bereavement to Rossetti, and an occasion
of genuine grief to all the Brotherhood, with whom he was exceedingly
popular. Nor was the loss to art easily reparable, or the work of his
surviving comrades unaffected by the removal of a painter of such
singular purity and grace. He was a son of the Secretary of the Schools
of Design, which were the precursor of the South Kensington Science and
Art Department.
Rossetti and Millais were thus, in 1854, left alone as practical
painters; W.M. Rossetti having been from the first exclusively a
_littérateur_, while F.G. Stephens, after having produced in youth some
work of high quality on strictly Pre-Raphaelite lines, had by this time
adopted the same sphere of energy, especially in the realm of the art-
critic.
But the phase of doubt and hesitation, of compromise (in no invidious
sense) between the first inflexible attitude of revolt and the further
impulse of re-construction, which had overtaken the Brotherhood in 1851,
was by no means the special ordeal of Rossetti. It came soon afterwards
upon Millais with an equal import and significance; as though each must
pass, in individual experience, through the several stages of
destructive and re-creative energy, first of protest, then of reform,
and afterwards of reconciliation and progress, which they had recognized
in the history of the past, and which their own work as a whole afforded
to the history of the nineteenth century. They had to exemplify, each
for himself, the resolute overthrow of partial and degenerate
principles, and the pursuit, more or less successful, of a further and
perhaps undefined ideal, or the reaction towards that very order against
which their own strenuous protest had been set. And it is remarkable
that, in the case both of Rossetti and of Millais, the painter should
have reached his highest level of excellence in art precisely at the
moment when his methods were the most unsettled and his principles the
least assured. The most discerning critics now agree in placing the
high-water mark of Rossetti’s genius in the midst of this transition
period, ranging from 1850 to 1860, or, if the decade may be stretched by
a license of etymology, covering the “Beata Beatrix” of 1863. And it is
scarcely disputable that the supreme achievements of Millais lie within
a narrower space, comprising chiefly the “Hugenot” and “Ophelia” of
1852, “The Order of Release” of 1853, “Autumn Leaves” and “The Blind
Girl” of 1856, and “The Eve of St. Agnes” in 1863, which really belongs
in conception and spirit to the Keats epoch, if we may so call it, which
gave birth to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Just as in the dawn of the
Italian Renaissance the point of absolute greatness in art was gained at
the momentary coalition of the old forces with the new, when the classic
spirit was conquered and absorbed by the spirit of romance, and the
romantic spirit still beat tremulously about the new world’s doors, so
in the struggle of the modern Pre-Raphaelites to reconcile the new
impulse with the heritage of the past, the triumph came in the midst of
the conflict rather than after the victory. Just as Leonardo and
Michaelangelo gathered up and combined the discordant elements of the
strife around them into a noble harmony of art, so did the Pre-
Raphaelites attune and interpret the diverse forces of their own
revolution when they felt its import most acutely, and least knew
whither it would lead them. And to almost opposite poles of thought and
sentiment were Millais and Rossetti led.
The extraordinary change which gradually came over the work of Millais
after his election to the Associateship of the Royal Academy in 1854—the
youngest painter, with the exception of Lawrence, ever admitted to that
rank—has been the subject of much criticism and controversy. It has been
contended by several writers that Millais lacked original imagination,
and could not sustain his early level without the constant inspiration
and stimulus of Rossetti and Hunt, both of whom were by this time
absorbed in fresh developments of their own. More ardent apologists have
claimed that his Pre-Raphaelite period was but a curious episode in
Millais’s career; a mere incident in the growth of a genius too
brilliant to submit for long to bias from without; and that his
impressionable nature was only temporarily swayed by the proselytizing
enthusiasm of his comrades. It is hard to attribute the qualities of his
finest work—qualities of a high imaginative order, as in “The Eve of St.
Agnes,” or “The Enemy Sowing Tares,” to any genius but his own, or to
believe that the painter of “Ophelia” and the “Blind Girl” was not
himself profoundly moved by the pathos and tragedy which he therein
conceived. Nor can it be urged that the exigencies of ill-fortune, the
stress of poverty, or any of those dire necessities of fate which have
driven many a true artist on the downward road, drove Millais to paint
as unblushingly for the Philistine market as he had formerly done for an
obscure and despised coterie of artistic revolutionists. Free as he
always was of pecuniary care, and favoured by destiny with all the
pleasures of domestic and social prosperity, if he was spoilt, it was by
success, not failure; if corrupted, it was by popularity, not neglect:
though it must be remembered that none of the Pre-Raphaelites can justly
pose as martyrs in the matter of a livelihood.
Nor is it permissible to urge that fame, at first well earned and richly
justified, entitles any great painter to repudiate the convictions and
ideals on which that fame was built, or to play with a reputation won at
a heavy cost to himself and others. It can only be assumed that Millais,
in forsaking the high and steep paths which he had once chosen,
sincerely followed what he felt to be a more excellent way, and honestly
believed his decadence to be an advance upon his maturity. To doubt this
would be to pass the sternest moral condemnation on an artist of
incomparable endowments, and to brand him as the wanton betrayer of a
sacred trust, the deliberate concealer of a divine talent, for which, at
the ultimate judgment-seat of art, the inevitable account must at last
be given.
Speaking of this turning-point in Millais’s career, Mr. Ruskin said in
1857:—“The change in his manner from the years of ‘Ophelia’ and
‘Mariana’ to 1857 is not merely Fall; it is Catastrophe; not merely a
loss of power, but a reversal of principle; his excellence has been
effaced ‘as a man wipeth a dish—wiping it and turning it upside down.’”
But the Pre-Raphaelite movement, so far from being at an end, was now
only emerging from the first tentative phase of its activity. It had yet
to be absorbed in a larger reformation, and to act thereby even more
potently than if it had remained the specific crusade of a clique or
faction. The difficulty which the historian finds at this crisis in the
artistic career of Rossetti and his friends, and still more so in their
subsequent developments,—the difficulty of defining strictly Pre-
Raphaelite work, and of deciding as to who of the now rapidly expanding
circle of painters may justly be claimed as Pre-Raphaelites, is itself
evidence of the permeating force of the initial movement, and of the
ready soil which was prepared for the dissemination of its dominant
ideas. For the circle of literary and artistic aspirants, patrons,
students, amateurs, and connoisseurs of many grades and varied gifts who
now surrounded Dante Rossetti, included men whose names afterwards
became honoured in fields of art quite untouched by Pre-Raphaelitism in
its distinctive form, but imbued through their influence with fresh and
quickening impulses of revival.
One of the most poetic of the painters intimately associated with the
Brotherhood was Arthur Hughes, who, though only eighteen at the time of
its formation, took an active share in its practical work, and painted,
according to its main tenets, with a rare facility and tender charm. He
was born in London in 1832, passed through the Academy Schools without
much recognition, but won cordial admiration among the limited company
who could then appreciate his work, by his beautiful “April Love” in the
Academy of 1854. He was also singularly successful at a later date in a
subject from Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes”—the source of inspiration for
some of the finest work of the Pre-Raphaelite leaders at various times.
Like Millais and several others of the band, he attained considerable
popularity as an illustrator of books. His religious paintings,
moreover, will demand attention among those of his more illustrious
friends. “The Cottager’s Return” and “The Reaper and the Flowers” may be
remembered, among others of his always graceful pictures, by those who
recall the first decade of Pre-Raphaelite propaganda in public
exhibitions. He sat as the model for the hero in Millais’s “Proscribed
Royalist” of 1853.
Charles Allston Collins, a son of William Collins, R.A., and brother of
Wilkie Collins, painted for some time in the manner of the Pre-
Raphaelites, but subsequently devoted himself to literature. His first
exhibited picture, “Convent Thoughts,” in the Academy of 1850, shared
with Millais’s “Christ in the House of His Parents,” the torrent of
opprobrium showered on the innovators in that eventful year. Yet three
of his works were accepted by the Academy the following season,—“Lyra
Innocentium,” on a verse from Keble; representing a young girl in a
white gown against a background of blue; “May in the Regent’s Park,” a
wonderfully minute study of foliage, as if seen through a window opening
close upon the trees; and “The Devout Childhood of Saint Elizabeth of
Hungary,” calling to mind the treatment by James Collinson of the
familiar renunciation-legend anent the same much-maligned saint. The
Elizabeth of the “Childhood” is depicted as a homely-looking little girl
of thirteen, kneeling at the iron-barred oaken door of a chapel in the
Palace grounds. Her missal is laid on the doorstep beside her, and she
is imagined, according to the account of her early piety, to be at
prayer on the inhospitable threshold of the shrine to which she cannot
for the moment gain access. Charles Collins acted as Millais’s model for
“The Hugenot” and “The Black Brunswicker.” He married a daughter of
Charles Dickens, who posed with him as the lady in the “Hugenot.”
William L. Windus, a Liverpool artist and member of the Academy of that
city, made his modest but genuine fame chiefly through his powerful
romantic picture of “Burd Helen,” the “burd” or sweetheart of the
Scottish border ballad, who swam the Clyde in order to avenge herself
upon a faithless lover. The work was pronounced by Ruskin to rank second
only in order of merit to Millais’s “Autumn Leaves” in the Royal Academy
of 1856. He painted altogether some eight or ten pictures of a very
earnest and imaginative kind, of which one of the finest was entitled
“Too Late,” and represented a dying girl whose lover had forsaken her
and returned too late for reparation. “The Surgeon’s Daughter” is also
remembered as a composition of much chastened and subdued power. Windus
ceased painting at an early age, and was lost sight of by the
Brotherhood.
Robert B. Martineau was a pupil of Holman Hunt, but painted, among some
three or four pictures which constitute the brief total of his
achievements, only one of striking merit,—“The Last Day in the Old
Home,” which for sincerity and depth of feeling won considerable
appreciation in 1865. His career was cut short by untimely death soon
afterwards.
Cave Thomas, who so infelicitously christened “The Germ,” had gained a
prize in the Westminster Cartoon competition, and was the painter of one
very beautiful picture, “The Protestant Lady,” exhibited in the Academy,
and greatly admired by the Brotherhood. He published in 1860 a monograph
entitled “Pre-Raphaelitism Tested by the Principles of Christianity;”
and subsequently became art professor to the Princess of Wales.
Mr. Frederick Sandys was not personally known to the leading Pre-
Raphaelites until 1857, and was by that time too original and
accomplished an artist to be claimed by them as a disciple, but his work
was for some time intimately associated with theirs. He was to the last
a valued friend of Rossetti, who always affirmed that while in
draughtsmanship he had no superior in English art, his imaginative
endowment was of the richest and rarest kind.
Mr. Henry Wallis is justly remembered by his one great picture, “The
Death of Chatterton,” which touched popular feeling as its true pathos
and dignity deserved to do, and won universal praise.
Mark Anthony is rightly regarded by the Pre-Raphaelites as the most
poetic of their landscape painters. His grandly simple and reposeful
“Old Churchyard” will compare even with Millais’s “Vale of Rest,” and
his “Nature’s Mirror” with Mr. Burne-Jones’s “Mirror of Venus” in later
years. Mr. John Brett, now famous in seascape, was for some time
intimate with the Brotherhood; and among friends and sympathizers on a
similar footing may be mentioned Val Prinsep, Thomas Seddon, J.D.
Watson, J.F. Lewes, W.S. Burton, Spencer Stanhope, M.F. Halliday, James
Campbell, J.M. Carrick, Thomas Morten, Edward Lear, William Davis, W.P.
Boyce, J.W. Inchbold, and, by no means least, John Hancock, a young
sculptor who won an Art Union prize in 1848 with a bas-relief of
“Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem.” He was a friend and fellow-worker with
Woolner, and fell so far (with Rossetti) under the fascination of the
Dante legends as to accomplish a very fine statue of “Beatrice” in or
about 1852. One other artist of the first rank in his generation remains
to be named,—Frederick Shields, an intimate and warmly-loved friend of
Rossetti, cherished by him in close and unbroken companionship even to
the hour of death; and in point of critical estimate pronounced by him
to be one of the greatest of living draughtsmen, taking rank with Sir
Frederick Leighton, Sir Noel Paton, and Mr. Sandys.
Such were a few of the personalities that gathered between 1848 and 1858
around the three prime movers in the Pre-Raphaelite revolt. To claim
them as merely, or chiefly, satellites drawn into the orbit of genius,
or as forming a distinct and coherent school, would be both foolish and
unjust. To attempt an estimate of their relative merit independent of,
or in proportion to, the artistic work of the Brotherhood, would be no
less invidious than unprofitable. The glory of Pre-Raphaelitism was that
it gave the utmost play to individual methods, and even idiosyncrasies,—
nay, that its very first principle was “each for himself”—painting his
own impressions, his own ideals—and no imitation of one artist by
another. Its primary insistence lay on the watchword of all
Protestantism—the authority of the individual conscience as against that
of a class or a system, and the immediate access for every soul to the
source of its highest inspiration. Therefore the “diversities of gifts”
which flourished and increased under the sway of the Pre-Raphaelite
spirit were the best evidence of that spirit’s quickening power. “A man
will always emphasize,” says Mr. P.G. Hamerton, writing on the ultimate
effects of the movement, “those truths about art which most strongly
recommend themselves to his own peculiar personal temperament. This
comes from the vastness of art and the variety of human organizations.
For art is so immense a study that no one man ever knew the whole truth
about it.” In other words, all the Pre-Raphaelite painters in any sense
worthy of the name are intensely individual in quality, and cannot be
classed, arranged, or compared together in the order of a system or a
school. Each artist must make his original and distinctive contribution
to the sum-total of artistic truth; must paint the single aspect, or the
most familiar aspect, of the life around him which presents itself to
his mind. The more honest he is, and the more true to his own
observations and convictions, the more inevitably will he see the world
through his own spectacles—well for his superficial happiness, at all
events, if they be rose-coloured, and not of a more sombre hue. “We
all,” says another art-critic,[5] “have a sense of some particular
colour, and because we can paint this colour best we do so at all times
and in all places. This may be unconscious on our part—this predilection
for a particular colour; but we all unconsciously blab the fact to
others; we talk in our dream of art, and tell all our secrets. Old David
Cox, when out sketching with his pupils, would go behind them while at
work and say to one, ‘Ah, you see green;’ to another, ‘You see purple,’
‘You see red,’ ‘You see yellow.’ So it is with the colour vision of many
who are called Masters. We can identify almost any landscape of our more
prominent painters by their special idiosyncrasy of colouring, such as
Cuyp with his evening yellows, Linnell with his autumnal browns, or
Danby with his sanguinary sunsets. These colours, which are exceptional
with external nature, are the rule with them. Not only is this so with
regard to colour, but, more or less, we put ourselves, form and feature,
into our work, and paint our own character, physical as well as mental,
in all we do. Raphael, on being asked where he obtained the type of his
Madonna, replied, ‘out of his own head,’ which really meant that he had
unconsciously painted his own fair features: and this ideal was what he
eternally repeated. So was it with Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Murillo,
Rubens, Vandyke—they all portrayed themselves recognizably. There is a
picture of Jesus and the twelve Apostles in which the whole thirteen
faces are all alike, and every one an identifiable copy of the painter’s
own. Of course where the face and form are noble we have the less to
object to.”
This indeed is the crux of the whole matter. As the man is, so will his
work be. To portray one’s very self—and first to have such a self as can
dignify the portrayal; to paint faithfully what one sees—and first to
see the true and the beautiful in the familiar and the commonplace; to
depict the world in which one lives—living in a world apart, noble and
fair, full of opportunities, if also of mysteries, with bright horizons,
however low the sun; and yet to be ever conscious of wider worlds than
the imagination can compass though the heart may yearn over them like
the heart of him who said _Homo sum; nihil humana mihi alienum puto_:
this is fine art; this is “the vision and the faculty divine.” “Produce
great Persons!” cries Browning,—“the rest follows.” Therefore it is safe
for those who in any real sense know Rossetti to prophesy, with Mr.
Harry Quilter, that “the day will surely come when it will be seen that
the essence of what is now known as Pre-Raphaelitism was not the
influence of a school or a principle, but simply the influence of one
man, and that man Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” Personal ascendency, says
Emerson, is the only force much worth reckoning with. And if that
ascendency, over many who never saw Rossetti on earth, has become an
intimate and precious inspiration, a motive-impulse abidingly sacred and
high, what must it have been to those who knew him in the flesh?
Mr. W.M. Rossetti thus succinctly sums up the immediate issue of the
movement which his brother inspired:—“As it turned out, the early phases
of the movement did not repeat themselves on a more extended scale.
Partly, no doubt, through the modification of style of the most popular
Pre-Raphaelite, Mr. Millais, and partly through the influx of new
determining conditions, especially the effect of foreign schools and of
Mr. Leighton’s style (this was written in 1865), Pre-Raphaelitism
flagged in its influence towards the production of what are
distinctively termed Pre-Raphaelite pictures just at the time when it
had virtually won the day. But the movement had broken up the pre-
existing state of things, and the principles and practices which it
introduced took strong root, and germinated in forms not altogether
expected. Pre-Raphaelitism aimed at suppressing such styles of painting
as were exemplified by Messrs. Elmore, Goodall, and Stone at the time of
its starting; _and it did suppress them_.”[6]
The relation of Pre-Raphaelitism to the “foreign schools” here referred
to is as much a matter of historical controversy as the relation of
Rossetti to Italy is of biographical criticism; nor is it easy to
determine how far the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England was the effect
or the cause of similar waves of experiment in France and Germany, and
how far all such impulses were but the symptoms of a great social and
ethical development in European life. But while the Barbizon School must
be seriously recognized as working side by side with the Pre-Raphaelites
upon kindred ideals, and even surpassing them at some points in a
certain largeness of outlook on humanitarian themes, the influence of
Cornelius and Overbeck in Germany, with the very crude and sickly
mediævalism which they affected, has no doubt been greatly overrated,
and may be dismissed as having very little to do with the main current
of the romantic revival. In France, Corot and Millet, Daubigny and
Rousseau, had taken their stand against the old Heroic School in art,
just as Théophile Gautier and Victor Hugo had taken it against the
Academies of literature. In England, it was the task of Rossetti and his
comrades “to force,” as it has been aptly expressed, “an artificial art
backed upon nature’s reality; and they did it amid neglect,
misunderstanding, and even coarse vituperation.”
-----
Footnote 5:
Gerald Massey: “Lectures on Pre-Raphaelitism,” 1858.
Footnote 6:
W.M. Rossetti: “Fine Art; Chiefly Contemporary.”