Another ten great Pre-Raphaelite paintings

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones - The Baleful Head (1886-7). Number eight in the Perseus Cycle inspired by William Morris' The Doom of King Acrisius from The Earthly Paradise where Perseus shows Andromeda the head of the Medusa in the reflection of a well in order to convince her of his divine origins and win her hand in marriage:
"Look down", he said,
"And take good heed thou turnest not thine head."
Then gazing down with shuddering dread and awe,
Over her imaged shoulder, soon she saw
The head rise up, so beautiful and dread,
That, white and ghastly, yet seemed scarcely dead
Beside the image of her own fair face..."



Ford Maddox Brown - Work (1852-65). On the fringes of the Pre-Raphaelite movement rather than a member, Brown was an influence on Rossetti, who he was close to. Work can be seen as a social realist painting centring on figures that represent the different classes of workers in Victorian society in different acts of labour, who are contrasted with middle class idlers, who stand away from the light in the composition.



Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones - Love Among The Ruins (1894). Its source was Robert Barrett Browning's narrative poem, Love Among the Ruins: "a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair/Waits me there..." Originally painted in as a watercolour in 1873, it was unwittingly destroyed in 1893 by a cleaner, who thought it was an oil painting; Burne-Jones recreated it in oils in 1894. Note the typically highly detailed costumes, especially the folds of the characters' robes, and the depiction of the relief and other stonework.



William Holman Hunt - The Scapegoat (1854-6) Portraying the 'scapegoat' in the Book of Leviticus, this painting was started on the Dead Sea during Hunt's first trip to the Holy Land. While studying the almud, he learned that "on the Festival of the Day of Atonement, a goat was ejected from the temple with a scarlet piece of woolen cloth on its head. It was goaded and driven, either to death or into the wilderness, carrying with it the sins of the congregation. It was believed that if these sins were forgiven the scarlet cloth would turn white. Hunt regarded the Old Testament scapegoat as a prefigurement of the New Testament Christ whose suffering and death similarly expunged man's sins."

In Leviticus the goat is said to "bear the iniquities into a land that was not inhabited. Hunt chose to set his goat in a landscape of quite hideous desolation - it is the shore of the Dead Sea at Oosdoom with the mountains of Edom in the distance." (http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/online/pre-raphaelites/scapegoat/)

On the desolate yet strangely luminous landscape, Hunt commented: "Never was so extraordinary a scene of beautifully arranged horrible wilderness. It is black, full of asphalte scum and in the hand slimy, and smarting as a sting — No one can stand and say that it is not accursed of God."

Two versions exist; this is the one in Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight; the other, darker painting, is in the collection of Manchester City Art Gallery.



Dante Gabriel Rossetti - The Day Dream (1880). The artist shows a "beautiful woman as sex object, blurring distinctions between the aesthetic and erotic. The model was William Morris' wife, Jane, described by Henry James as 'guiltless of hoops' (meaning she daringly used neither supports nor stays leaving her voluptuous curves explicit). The imagery is as explicit as her body: in an unambiguously erotic gesture with the honeysuckle, she encourages sap to rise. Inspired by a Tennyson poem - "Her full black ringlets downward roll'd" - Rossetti wrote a sonnet of his own on the frame. His vocabulary suggests a ripe sexuality: "nursed in mellow intercourse", "sheathed", "tongues", "buds". Tennyson had written, "Beyond the night, across the day/Thro' all the world she followed him"."
http://www.vam.ac.uk/images/image/10019-popup.html



William Bell Scott - Iron and Coal (1855-60) In 1844, Scott was appointed master of the government school of design at Newcastle-on-Tyne and he held the post for twenty years. This, a rare Pre-Raphaelite painting to wholeheartedly celebrate industry and look to the future (perhaps represented by the little girl looking out of the painting), is one of eight paintings depicting the history of Northumbria completed as part of a frieze at Wallington Hall in Northumberland. If you look none too carefully at the actual painting, you can see where he's altered the angle of the worker's arm.



William Holman Hunt - The Awakening Conscience (1853): the mistress, surrounded by signs of her wasted life and 'kept' woman status, rises from the man's lap and suddenly sees the light. Of more relevance to the FNB, it's also the cover art of Loudon Wainwright's rather good album More Love Songs (avoid the CD version that contains The Acid Song) and on my copy, I have the Great Man's autograph.



John Everett Millais - Mariana in the Moated Grange (1851).
"She only said, 'My life is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'

Tennyson's Mariana (1830)
(http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=26762&tabview=text&texttype=10)



Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones - The Golden Stairs (worked on from 1876 and finished in1880). The first of Burne-Jones' large scale works. Is it purely decorative with the emphasis on composition and design or does it have some deep meaning? It's your call. I like it.



William Holman Hunt - Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1868). Note the way she drapes herself over the pot, reflecting Keats' lines that she "hung over her sweet Basil evermore,/And moistened it with tears unto the core." On display at Newcastle's Laing Art Gallery, of course, where you can marvel in peace (because it's usually empty) at the detail on the embroidered cloth, the way Hunt has portrayed the different textures and the fluidity with which he painted her toes!