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The Pre-Raphaelites: Colour Library
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had a dynamic influence upon the Victorian era. The painters, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, fought against an increasing mechanized society to establish the artist as a creative individual, attempting to raise art from the triviality into which it had fallen. This commitment was combined with a love of literature and history, and in particular a passionate interest in the art preceding the period of Raphael and the great Renaissance masters, an art which seemed to mirror their aims. Moreover, their ambitions encouraged artists in all fields to adopt new aesthetics.
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
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September 30, 2023
Having booked tickets to see a major exhibition of “The Rossettis” at Tate Britain, I decided to reread my 3 huge books on the Pre-Raphaelites. First to be published was this one, initally in 1977 but then reworked and republished several times, most recently in 1999. The Pre-Raphaelites forms part of “The Phaidon Colour Library Series” of oversize Art books, which are usually excellent. Phaidon is one of the main publishers of books on Art worldwide, and this particular series of oversize books is designed to provide an introduction to about 50 key artists and movements in Art history.
I have a few, as I particularly like the fine quality of the reproductions. It is an unusual format, as the reproductions—48 in this case—are all printed full-page on glossy paper, and grouped at the back of the book. Each volume starts with an essay by a different art academic or critic. In between is a comprehensive list of all the plates, giving the title of the work, (and alternatives where relevant) the artist, location and dimensions. This last can be particularly useful as it can be startling to discover in a gallery that a work you know from a book is perhaps only a few inches tall—or conversely that it is absolutely huge and needs to be viewed from a distance.
Andrea Rose’s The Pre-Raphaelites discusses how the movement started and the aspirations of its founder members. She analyses the differences between the artists, pointing out that they were concerned with different aspects from the beginning, and this is why the true Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood only existed for 5 years—between 1848 and 1853—the time during which they signed their work “PRB” rather than with their individual initials.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood began with just three core members: William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. They were all students at the Royal Academy of Art, who shared a common vision: to rescue Art from the triviality and sterility into which they believed it had fallen. One evening they were at Millais’s parents’ house in Gower Street, London, looking through a volume of engravings by Carlo Lassinio, and as Andrea Rose says: “found in these works a focusing matrix into which they could pour their as yet formless aspirations for a regeneration of English Art”.
Disenchanted with the formal style drummed into them each day: the prescribed classical poses and subtle but dull colouration, the young students decided to form a secret fraternity, calling it the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood”. It had to be secret because what they were objecting to most was the mannered, posed portraits of “Sir Sloshua”, which they found vapid and tame, and painted in a sloppy way. The High Renaissance painting of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Michelangelo (1475–1564), and Raphael (1483–1520), and even the 17th century schools of Northern Italy had fostered a school of British painters who were adept at painting chiaroscuro, (a particular lighting effect of bold contrasts) pyramidal construction, histrionic gestures, loose open brushwork and Italianate landscape. But in doing so, they felt that these contemporary artists had lost the mental attitudes and original motivations of the Old Masters. What they needed, the PRB believed, was what William Blake (whom they much admired) had called “the wiry line of rectitude”.
But “Sir Sloshua” was in fact Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts where they were studying, hence the need for secrecy. In fact they sought to keep the Brotherhood a secret from the whole of the Royal Academy.
These three young rebels wanted to return to the almost forensically observed detail, intense colours and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian art. For these three artists, the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael were where the passion and essential truth of Art began to go downhill. They wanted to reform the academic sterility they saw, and return to expressing a genuine emotional engagement with their subject. They decided to admit 4 more members, thereby making a Brotherhood of 7 members.
The number 7 was critical, as a mystical cipher. Andrea Rose postulates that they might have had in mind the Seven Sleepers: a group of early Christians who feel asleep in a cave where they had fled to avoid persecution, and who woke 200 years later when what had been the Roman Empire was Christian. They could also be modelling themselves on the “Nazarenes”: a group of early 19th-century German Catholic Romantic painters who adopted a monastic existence, and aimed to revive spirituality in art. Whatever the initial spark, all seven of them had to believe that true art was essentially spiritual in character.
The only other painter invited was James Collinson, who was a devout Catholic. (He did briefly change faith to High Anglican as he planned to marry Rossetti’s sister Christina, but this did not happen, and he only stayed with the PRB for 2 years). His canvasses have a High Church flavour.
The final three were not painters. There was Frederick George Stephens, whom we mostly remember now for communicating the aims of the Brotherhood to the public. He wrote articles for their magazine “The Germ” under various names. Thomas Woolner, a sculptor and poet was also invited, and the last was Rossetti’s brother, William Michael Rossetti. He was not an artist either, but supported them faithfully as their secretary and historian.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood made a list of “Immortals”: the artistic heroes whom they admired from literature, including Keats and Tennyson whose works they would produce paintings for. And they agreed that the movement’s sole principle was that of “absolute and uncompromising truth in all that it does, obtained by working everything, down to the most minute detail, from nature, and from nature only”. This was to allow each artist flexibility and independence to follow whatever subject matter he should wish.
At the time Rossetti was very impressed by a painting he had seen by Ford Maddox Brown. He wrote a sort of “fan” letter to the artist, enthusing about it, but Maddox Brown was so doubtful that this was genuine, that Rossetti got a very chilly reception! Rossetti continued to be so full of praise that Maddox Brown realised he was in earnest. The older artist declined to join the PRB, perhaps with an eye to his reputation, but he remained supportive all his life.
Rossetti was enthusiastic about early Flemish art, which influenced his ideas about striking out on a new artistic course. During their trip to Bruges and Ghent in the Autumn of 1849, both Rossetti and Holman Hunt were deeply moved by the work of Van Eyck and Hans Memling. We can see the influences in the first painting he signed PRB “Girlhood of Mary Virgin” (shown at a Free Exhibition on Hyde Park Corner), using his own mother, sister and servant as models:
The painting is packed with symbolism and motifs, which Rossetti would continue to use in his works. He wrote 2 sonnets to explain the symbolism: Mary is shown embroidering a lily (a traditional symbol of purity) while her father, (Joachim) prunes a vine in the background, which refers to the coming of Christ, who called himself “the True Vine”. The vine is shaped like a cross, prefiguring Christ’s crucifixion; the pale roses and thorn-shaped branches on the wall also relate to this and to Mary’s seven joys and seven sorrows. A crossed palm branch on the floor refers to Palm Sunday and Good Friday. The oil lamp symbolises piety. The three coloured books symbolise the three cardinal virtues and the “rose without a thorn” is another symbol for Mary. The dove symbolises the Holy Spirit, and prefigures Rossetti's next major PRB painting “Ecce Ancilla Domini!” (The Annunciation) which is also packed with symbolism.
Millais’s first important religious subject for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood showed a scene from the boyhood of Christ. Again, it was a fusion of object, symbol and idea, with the aim of communicating a sense of total reality. Being true to nature was considered paramount, so Millais painted the scene in meticulous detail and based the setting on a real carpenter’s shop in Oxford Street:
But the public expected classical poses, and were shocked at the “plebian” demeanour and “jerky” position of the figures; the disrespectful depiction of a carpentry workshop, especially the dirt and detritus on the floor. “Christ in the House of His Parents” seems realistic and inoffensive to a modern audience, but it catapulted the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to notoriety. Charles Dickens, the voice of the people, was outraged and wrote:
“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, who appears to have received a probe in the hand, from the stick of another boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so hideous in her ugliness that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) 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.”
Phew! Ford Maddox Brown had said that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood aimed to “touch the Philistine on the raw”, and Millais certainly seemed to have done this with Dickens! Thankfully, he did adapt his vitriolic views over time.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a diverse group, with varying styles and subject matter. Rossetti was an aspiring poet, and wished to develop the links between Romantic poetry and art, finding his inspiration in the imaginative life of literature and legend. He especially admired Dante, whose poetry he had known all his life, as his father was a scholar who had translated Dante’s works. Rossetti was also fascinated by medieval culture, believing it to possess a spiritual and creative integrity that had been lost in later eras. From the start he made great use of symbolism, and just as with medieval art, Rossetti’s paintings are full of significant and meaningful motifs.
However the literary and medieval fantasy element clashed with the principles of realism held paramount by Holman Hunt and Millais. They stressed the importance of nature, and observing in great detail to show the natural world using bright and sharp-focus techniques on a white canvas. They despised the use of bitumen by earlier British artists, which produced muddy, dark areas, where the colour was unstable. In fact the two artists Holman Hunt and Millais developed a new technique of painting in thin glazes of pigment, over a wet white ground to try to recapture the brilliance of colour they found in Quattrocento art. They hoped that this would convey the emotion of a moment in time, and capture the reality.
The jewel-like transparency of the colours, plus the clarity and detail do indeed engage us emotionally, but as Andrea Rose points out, the effect is oddly artificial. Some paintings where the subjects are evidently in motion, look more like “freeze-frame images”:
The Stonebreaker - John Brett (1858)
It would be at least a couple of decades later, for instance with the Impressionists, when an effect of movement could be captured—and these techniques had nothing to do with a close forensic observation of nature. It has to be said though, that the Pre-Raphaelites did pave the way for the use of brilliant colour in many of the developing modern Art movements.
This realist group led by Hunt and Millais began to grow apart from the medievalists, led by Rossetti and his followers and pupils, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. John William Waterhouse was an associate too, with his literary-based depictions of women from both ancient Greek mythology and Arthurian legend. William Morris was also to form the Arts and Craft movement. What had begun as a movement of reform against academic sterility began to lead a Victorian revolution. The aim was to reinforce the importance of the individual in an increasingly mechanised society, and it reached into all aesthetic areas: wallpaper, domestic furniture, clothes, stage design and architecture.
Running parallel with this were the artists who were concerned with the changing laws of the time, and produced work on social justice, exploring themes of democracy and freedom, liberty and justice within an industrial context. Two early ones are “The Last of England” (1855)
showing an emigrating couple, and “Take Your Son, Sir”! (1857), a challenge to the stigma of illegitimacy for women, in support of the new Divorce Bill, granting separated women the power to sue. “Work” is a famous masterpiece about proletarian rights, which was begun in 1852 but not completed until 1865. All three were by Ford Madox Brown.
“Work” by Ford Madox Brown
Andrea Rose, the author of this book, has an impressive record as an Art Historian, including positions as the Deputy Keeper of Art at Birmingham City Art Gallery, and the Director of Visual Arts at the British Council, as well as writing extensively on British art, from the Pre-Raphaelites to Francis Bacon. Since this book was initially published well over 40 years ago (and I have found evidence of lectures from last year) it was evidently quite a youthful work.
Perhaps this accounts for the overly scholarly tone of what the publishers intended as an introduction to various movements in Art for the general reader, students and museum-goers. It has to be said that some of the text here is very congested and dry. When reading a book on a subject you enjoy, it is tiresome to have to read a few sentences two or three times before the meaning is clear. Here’s an example:
“One’s nearness to such pictures, together with their strident colour and etched contours, contributes to the emotional engagement demanded by their authors, and if the method was unsubtle, it further indicates the degree of apathy which the Pre-Raphaelites felt that they had to attack in their public …”
Fair enough. We understand that the paintings had to grab the public, and make them feel something, by use of bright colours and so on. But it goes on:
“… But the risk of alienation which they ran with such methods was not sufficiently calculated; the moral earnestness which typifies their original efforts, and which stamps them indelibly as mid-Victorian aestheticians, was to become, paradoxically, the progenitor of a detachment in art that has become one of the major critical and aesthetic principles of the twentieth century.”
What? Yes, we understand the words, but getting to the sense means we probably have to read it again. This is a slow process, (and I’m not at all sure that she is describing a specific characteristic of the Pre-Raphaelites, anyway). However Art books can be notorious for obfuscation. I was asked a few years ago to “improve the English” of a book on new Art works from an East European country, and found that some parts were so elusive and fancifully expressed, that any cogent translation of them as sentences was practically impossible. It would have been much easier to start from scratch! Hopefully Andrea Rose’s later books are more lucid and clearly written.
And the cover picture? It is a detail from “Lorenzo and Isabella” (1848) by Millais; a good choice, I feel. Here is the whole:
Several of the Pre-Raphaelites used this tale (initially from Boccaccio’s “Decameron” but retold in Keats’s poem, “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil”). Isabella is the sister of wealthy medieval merchants, and Lorenzo is their employee. This shows Isabella’s brothers realising that there is a romance between the two, and plotting to murder Lorenzo so they can marry Isabella to a wealthy nobleman. Isabella is being handed a blood orange on a plate by the doomed Lorenzo.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood itself only existed for a short while, but had a dynamic influence upon the Victorian era, and an extensive influence far beyond. The romantic medievalism pertained, but later pictures seemed to illustrate rather than to evoke feeling. The symbols and motifs became incorporated into designs, as time passed and the public forgot to what they referred.
However, the later works tend now to overshadow the early ones. Perhaps it is the females you think of and identify as Pre-Raphaelite; the listless, languorous, brooding women, full of melancholy. These are later too. Andrea Rose points out that Rossetti’s work became emotionally flaccid by the 1870s, and Rossetti himself said:
“Look in my face; my name is Might-Have-Been. I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell.”
Yet this was only 5 years after the construction of all their great plans.
There are complex reasons for why the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood surged, exploded and then splintered, leaving parts of itself in many directions. Other books also look at later artists’ work in detail, but Andrea Rose specificially examines the philosophy behind the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and how it developed. It is not a “primer” as the Phaidon series intended, but there is good material here.
I have a few, as I particularly like the fine quality of the reproductions. It is an unusual format, as the reproductions—48 in this case—are all printed full-page on glossy paper, and grouped at the back of the book. Each volume starts with an essay by a different art academic or critic. In between is a comprehensive list of all the plates, giving the title of the work, (and alternatives where relevant) the artist, location and dimensions. This last can be particularly useful as it can be startling to discover in a gallery that a work you know from a book is perhaps only a few inches tall—or conversely that it is absolutely huge and needs to be viewed from a distance.
Andrea Rose’s The Pre-Raphaelites discusses how the movement started and the aspirations of its founder members. She analyses the differences between the artists, pointing out that they were concerned with different aspects from the beginning, and this is why the true Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood only existed for 5 years—between 1848 and 1853—the time during which they signed their work “PRB” rather than with their individual initials.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood began with just three core members: William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. They were all students at the Royal Academy of Art, who shared a common vision: to rescue Art from the triviality and sterility into which they believed it had fallen. One evening they were at Millais’s parents’ house in Gower Street, London, looking through a volume of engravings by Carlo Lassinio, and as Andrea Rose says: “found in these works a focusing matrix into which they could pour their as yet formless aspirations for a regeneration of English Art”.
Disenchanted with the formal style drummed into them each day: the prescribed classical poses and subtle but dull colouration, the young students decided to form a secret fraternity, calling it the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood”. It had to be secret because what they were objecting to most was the mannered, posed portraits of “Sir Sloshua”, which they found vapid and tame, and painted in a sloppy way. The High Renaissance painting of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Michelangelo (1475–1564), and Raphael (1483–1520), and even the 17th century schools of Northern Italy had fostered a school of British painters who were adept at painting chiaroscuro, (a particular lighting effect of bold contrasts) pyramidal construction, histrionic gestures, loose open brushwork and Italianate landscape. But in doing so, they felt that these contemporary artists had lost the mental attitudes and original motivations of the Old Masters. What they needed, the PRB believed, was what William Blake (whom they much admired) had called “the wiry line of rectitude”.
But “Sir Sloshua” was in fact Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts where they were studying, hence the need for secrecy. In fact they sought to keep the Brotherhood a secret from the whole of the Royal Academy.
These three young rebels wanted to return to the almost forensically observed detail, intense colours and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian art. For these three artists, the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael were where the passion and essential truth of Art began to go downhill. They wanted to reform the academic sterility they saw, and return to expressing a genuine emotional engagement with their subject. They decided to admit 4 more members, thereby making a Brotherhood of 7 members.
The number 7 was critical, as a mystical cipher. Andrea Rose postulates that they might have had in mind the Seven Sleepers: a group of early Christians who feel asleep in a cave where they had fled to avoid persecution, and who woke 200 years later when what had been the Roman Empire was Christian. They could also be modelling themselves on the “Nazarenes”: a group of early 19th-century German Catholic Romantic painters who adopted a monastic existence, and aimed to revive spirituality in art. Whatever the initial spark, all seven of them had to believe that true art was essentially spiritual in character.
The only other painter invited was James Collinson, who was a devout Catholic. (He did briefly change faith to High Anglican as he planned to marry Rossetti’s sister Christina, but this did not happen, and he only stayed with the PRB for 2 years). His canvasses have a High Church flavour.
The final three were not painters. There was Frederick George Stephens, whom we mostly remember now for communicating the aims of the Brotherhood to the public. He wrote articles for their magazine “The Germ” under various names. Thomas Woolner, a sculptor and poet was also invited, and the last was Rossetti’s brother, William Michael Rossetti. He was not an artist either, but supported them faithfully as their secretary and historian.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood made a list of “Immortals”: the artistic heroes whom they admired from literature, including Keats and Tennyson whose works they would produce paintings for. And they agreed that the movement’s sole principle was that of “absolute and uncompromising truth in all that it does, obtained by working everything, down to the most minute detail, from nature, and from nature only”. This was to allow each artist flexibility and independence to follow whatever subject matter he should wish.
At the time Rossetti was very impressed by a painting he had seen by Ford Maddox Brown. He wrote a sort of “fan” letter to the artist, enthusing about it, but Maddox Brown was so doubtful that this was genuine, that Rossetti got a very chilly reception! Rossetti continued to be so full of praise that Maddox Brown realised he was in earnest. The older artist declined to join the PRB, perhaps with an eye to his reputation, but he remained supportive all his life.
Rossetti was enthusiastic about early Flemish art, which influenced his ideas about striking out on a new artistic course. During their trip to Bruges and Ghent in the Autumn of 1849, both Rossetti and Holman Hunt were deeply moved by the work of Van Eyck and Hans Memling. We can see the influences in the first painting he signed PRB “Girlhood of Mary Virgin” (shown at a Free Exhibition on Hyde Park Corner), using his own mother, sister and servant as models:
The painting is packed with symbolism and motifs, which Rossetti would continue to use in his works. He wrote 2 sonnets to explain the symbolism: Mary is shown embroidering a lily (a traditional symbol of purity) while her father, (Joachim) prunes a vine in the background, which refers to the coming of Christ, who called himself “the True Vine”. The vine is shaped like a cross, prefiguring Christ’s crucifixion; the pale roses and thorn-shaped branches on the wall also relate to this and to Mary’s seven joys and seven sorrows. A crossed palm branch on the floor refers to Palm Sunday and Good Friday. The oil lamp symbolises piety. The three coloured books symbolise the three cardinal virtues and the “rose without a thorn” is another symbol for Mary. The dove symbolises the Holy Spirit, and prefigures Rossetti's next major PRB painting “Ecce Ancilla Domini!” (The Annunciation) which is also packed with symbolism.
Millais’s first important religious subject for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood showed a scene from the boyhood of Christ. Again, it was a fusion of object, symbol and idea, with the aim of communicating a sense of total reality. Being true to nature was considered paramount, so Millais painted the scene in meticulous detail and based the setting on a real carpenter’s shop in Oxford Street:
But the public expected classical poses, and were shocked at the “plebian” demeanour and “jerky” position of the figures; the disrespectful depiction of a carpentry workshop, especially the dirt and detritus on the floor. “Christ in the House of His Parents” seems realistic and inoffensive to a modern audience, but it catapulted the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to notoriety. Charles Dickens, the voice of the people, was outraged and wrote:
“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, who appears to have received a probe in the hand, from the stick of another boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so hideous in her ugliness that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) 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.”
Phew! Ford Maddox Brown had said that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood aimed to “touch the Philistine on the raw”, and Millais certainly seemed to have done this with Dickens! Thankfully, he did adapt his vitriolic views over time.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a diverse group, with varying styles and subject matter. Rossetti was an aspiring poet, and wished to develop the links between Romantic poetry and art, finding his inspiration in the imaginative life of literature and legend. He especially admired Dante, whose poetry he had known all his life, as his father was a scholar who had translated Dante’s works. Rossetti was also fascinated by medieval culture, believing it to possess a spiritual and creative integrity that had been lost in later eras. From the start he made great use of symbolism, and just as with medieval art, Rossetti’s paintings are full of significant and meaningful motifs.
However the literary and medieval fantasy element clashed with the principles of realism held paramount by Holman Hunt and Millais. They stressed the importance of nature, and observing in great detail to show the natural world using bright and sharp-focus techniques on a white canvas. They despised the use of bitumen by earlier British artists, which produced muddy, dark areas, where the colour was unstable. In fact the two artists Holman Hunt and Millais developed a new technique of painting in thin glazes of pigment, over a wet white ground to try to recapture the brilliance of colour they found in Quattrocento art. They hoped that this would convey the emotion of a moment in time, and capture the reality.
The jewel-like transparency of the colours, plus the clarity and detail do indeed engage us emotionally, but as Andrea Rose points out, the effect is oddly artificial. Some paintings where the subjects are evidently in motion, look more like “freeze-frame images”:
The Stonebreaker - John Brett (1858)
It would be at least a couple of decades later, for instance with the Impressionists, when an effect of movement could be captured—and these techniques had nothing to do with a close forensic observation of nature. It has to be said though, that the Pre-Raphaelites did pave the way for the use of brilliant colour in many of the developing modern Art movements.
This realist group led by Hunt and Millais began to grow apart from the medievalists, led by Rossetti and his followers and pupils, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. John William Waterhouse was an associate too, with his literary-based depictions of women from both ancient Greek mythology and Arthurian legend. William Morris was also to form the Arts and Craft movement. What had begun as a movement of reform against academic sterility began to lead a Victorian revolution. The aim was to reinforce the importance of the individual in an increasingly mechanised society, and it reached into all aesthetic areas: wallpaper, domestic furniture, clothes, stage design and architecture.
Running parallel with this were the artists who were concerned with the changing laws of the time, and produced work on social justice, exploring themes of democracy and freedom, liberty and justice within an industrial context. Two early ones are “The Last of England” (1855)
showing an emigrating couple, and “Take Your Son, Sir”! (1857), a challenge to the stigma of illegitimacy for women, in support of the new Divorce Bill, granting separated women the power to sue. “Work” is a famous masterpiece about proletarian rights, which was begun in 1852 but not completed until 1865. All three were by Ford Madox Brown.
“Work” by Ford Madox Brown
Andrea Rose, the author of this book, has an impressive record as an Art Historian, including positions as the Deputy Keeper of Art at Birmingham City Art Gallery, and the Director of Visual Arts at the British Council, as well as writing extensively on British art, from the Pre-Raphaelites to Francis Bacon. Since this book was initially published well over 40 years ago (and I have found evidence of lectures from last year) it was evidently quite a youthful work.
Perhaps this accounts for the overly scholarly tone of what the publishers intended as an introduction to various movements in Art for the general reader, students and museum-goers. It has to be said that some of the text here is very congested and dry. When reading a book on a subject you enjoy, it is tiresome to have to read a few sentences two or three times before the meaning is clear. Here’s an example:
“One’s nearness to such pictures, together with their strident colour and etched contours, contributes to the emotional engagement demanded by their authors, and if the method was unsubtle, it further indicates the degree of apathy which the Pre-Raphaelites felt that they had to attack in their public …”
Fair enough. We understand that the paintings had to grab the public, and make them feel something, by use of bright colours and so on. But it goes on:
“… But the risk of alienation which they ran with such methods was not sufficiently calculated; the moral earnestness which typifies their original efforts, and which stamps them indelibly as mid-Victorian aestheticians, was to become, paradoxically, the progenitor of a detachment in art that has become one of the major critical and aesthetic principles of the twentieth century.”
What? Yes, we understand the words, but getting to the sense means we probably have to read it again. This is a slow process, (and I’m not at all sure that she is describing a specific characteristic of the Pre-Raphaelites, anyway). However Art books can be notorious for obfuscation. I was asked a few years ago to “improve the English” of a book on new Art works from an East European country, and found that some parts were so elusive and fancifully expressed, that any cogent translation of them as sentences was practically impossible. It would have been much easier to start from scratch! Hopefully Andrea Rose’s later books are more lucid and clearly written.
And the cover picture? It is a detail from “Lorenzo and Isabella” (1848) by Millais; a good choice, I feel. Here is the whole:
Several of the Pre-Raphaelites used this tale (initially from Boccaccio’s “Decameron” but retold in Keats’s poem, “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil”). Isabella is the sister of wealthy medieval merchants, and Lorenzo is their employee. This shows Isabella’s brothers realising that there is a romance between the two, and plotting to murder Lorenzo so they can marry Isabella to a wealthy nobleman. Isabella is being handed a blood orange on a plate by the doomed Lorenzo.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood itself only existed for a short while, but had a dynamic influence upon the Victorian era, and an extensive influence far beyond. The romantic medievalism pertained, but later pictures seemed to illustrate rather than to evoke feeling. The symbols and motifs became incorporated into designs, as time passed and the public forgot to what they referred.
However, the later works tend now to overshadow the early ones. Perhaps it is the females you think of and identify as Pre-Raphaelite; the listless, languorous, brooding women, full of melancholy. These are later too. Andrea Rose points out that Rossetti’s work became emotionally flaccid by the 1870s, and Rossetti himself said:
“Look in my face; my name is Might-Have-Been. I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell.”
Yet this was only 5 years after the construction of all their great plans.
There are complex reasons for why the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood surged, exploded and then splintered, leaving parts of itself in many directions. Other books also look at later artists’ work in detail, but Andrea Rose specificially examines the philosophy behind the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and how it developed. It is not a “primer” as the Phaidon series intended, but there is good material here.
November 16, 2017
The reproductions are nice, but the essays are a bit too detached for my taste. I picked up the book in order to get a primer for pre-raphaelite painting and symbolism, but the essays deal more with minor issues in the lives of the painters than what they actually painted.
August 12, 2014
Given as a present, this is a cheap and cheerful edition on the Pre-Raphaelites is from the 'Colour Library' Phaidon series, which has information about them to start with and then has 48 plates of Pre-Raphaelite paintings with information about each of those.
The founding members plus their supporters and lesser known artists can be found here. The reproductions are ok, I have seen better. One entry refers to a painting of Jane Morris as 'Queen Guenevere' which is these days referred to as La Belle Iseult due to the subject matter. However, the book's interpretation of 'Take Your Son Sir' is more plausible than the Tate's mutterings in a catalogue for a recent exhibition of the same picture, offering a fascinating insight into this work.
Inexpensive, informative and good if want to know the basics on the Pre-Raphaelites.
The founding members plus their supporters and lesser known artists can be found here. The reproductions are ok, I have seen better. One entry refers to a painting of Jane Morris as 'Queen Guenevere' which is these days referred to as La Belle Iseult due to the subject matter. However, the book's interpretation of 'Take Your Son Sir' is more plausible than the Tate's mutterings in a catalogue for a recent exhibition of the same picture, offering a fascinating insight into this work.
Inexpensive, informative and good if want to know the basics on the Pre-Raphaelites.
September 21, 2015
An excellent introduction to the major works and lives of the Pre-Raphaelite artists, notably Rossetti, Holman-Hunt, Millais and Burne-Jones, but other less well know names to the uninitiated like myself. I have read several books in Phaidon's Colour Library series and this is my favourite so far - a good introduction, discussing the background and formation of the group, then the fine reproductions of the paintings accompanied by interesting commentaries putting each image in its social and historical context, along with what the artist was trying to achieve; the reactions of both the viewing public and the artistic establishment; the time, place and people who sat for the artists are discussed, giving a rounded and informative look at this rebellious and convention-challenging group.
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