Stephen Wildman, director of the Ruskin Library, chooses his favourites from the Brotherhood
Stephen Wildman
The Observer
Sunday 12 September 2010
1 John Everett Millais: Isabella (1848-49)
There were seven members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) founded in 1848, all young artists or writers of a romantic and rebellious nature, dissatisfied with what was taught and exhibited at the Royal Academy. They took their inspiration and what the critic John Ruskin called their "unfortunate and somewhat ludicrous" name, from the idea that art before the time of Raphael – early Renaissance painting – was more direct and honest than what was later promoted in academies and textbooks. Isabella was one of the group's first major paintings. It was shown at the RA in 1849 and carries the initials PRB, carved on the chair leg. Millais combined extreme profiles and flattened perspective with sharp detail and vibrant colour. The subject the doomed lovers Lorenzo and Isabella, from Keats's 1818 poem Isabella, or The Pot of Basil.
2 Arthur Hughes: The Long Engagement (1859)Inspired by the pre-Raphaelites while a student at the Royal Academy, Hughes maintained their style and themes long after the PRB had disbanded. He specialised in literary and romantic subjects with figures often in landscape settings, using a distinctive palette including purple from newly available pigments. This memorable two-figure composition – not forgetting the faithful dog – is a poignant commentary on a contemporary social issue: the clergyman is too poorly paid to marry, and during their long engagement ivy has grown over the name of his beloved, cut into the tree.
3 Henry Wallis: Chatterton (1855-56)Striking images of single or double figures, frozen at a moment of tension or crisis, or even death, were a mainstay of pre-Raphaelite art. Wallis's re-creation of the suicide by poison of Thomas Chatterton, the gifted young 18th-century poet, has become an icon of the neglected genius starving in his attic. By 1856, when this was shown at the Royal Academy, pre-Raphaelitism had all but won its battle, and the young Wallis "found himself famous". There are typical pre-Raphaelite personal complications behind the painting: the model for Chatterton was the poet and novelist George Meredith, whose wife Mary Ellen ran off with the painter two years later.
4 Millais: Christ in the House of His Parents (The Carpenter's Shop) (1849-50)This created a furore when first shown at the Royal Academy. Many were outraged by its realistic treatment of the life of Christ. So strong was the pre-Raphaelite principle of truth to nature that Millais did part of his work in an actual carpenter's shop: for the figure of Joseph the head of the artist's father was used in conjunction with the carefully observed artisan's body. Charles Dickens, a poor judge of art, was among many caustic critics, but Queen Victoria had it brought from the Academy for a private viewing.
5 Millais: Ophelia (1851-52)Shakespeare provided a rich source for pre-Raphaelite paintings, but rarely for simple theatrical effect. Millais uses the drowning of Ophelia in Hamlet for a bravura demonstration of close nature study, many of the plants also carrying symbolic significance, including forget-me-nots and the poppy for death. The setting is the Hogsmill River at Ewell in Surrey, and the model, the red-headed Elizabeth Siddal, famously posed in a bath of water heated by lamps, catching a terrible cold when they went out.
6 Edward Burne-Jones: Laus Veneris (1873-75)
Burne-Jones is the best known among the second generation of painters who were connected with the PRB but who could be better called late romantic or symbolist (post-pre-Raphaelite would be accurate, but sounds ridiculous). A fellow student at Oxford University with William Morris, he owed much to early encouragement from Rossetti and Ruskin, but gradually developed his own style, absorbing Old Master and classical motifs. A sensuous languor and a synaesthesia of art, sex and music pervade Laus Veneris (The Song of Venus), which loosely evokes the German legend of Tannhäuser, filtered through the poetry of Algernon Swinburne (a close friend) as well as the Wagner opera of 1861.
7 William Holman Hunt: The Light of the World (1851-53)The most earnestly religious member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood PRB, Holman Hunt spent two years in the Holy Land from 1854, working on The Scapegoat and The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple. Before he left, he completed this picture and its secular counterpart, The Awakening Conscience. Each combines moral truth with painterly realism, in a way that delighted Ruskin, who wrote letters of praise to the Times. Hunt told a friend that he had painted it "with what I thought to be divine command, and not simply as a good subject". A larger and later version (painted in 1900) hangs in St Paul's Cathedral.
8 Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Blue Bower (1865)
Of Italian parentage but born in London, Rossetti was the flamboyant driving force behind the PRB, and also a celebrated poet. His early work was mostly in watercolour, concentrating on medieval romantic themes such as the Arthurian legend, and he began painting in oils seriously only in the 1860s. Elizabeth Siddal had been his model, mistress and wife, but after her suicide in 1862 Rossetti turned to the earthier Sarah Cox, better known as Fanny Cornforth. Lacking any specific subject, The Blue Bower is a typical celebration of controlled female sensuality, often matched in his poetry. Passion flowers add to the atmosphere and the symbolism, together with exotic details such as the Indian jewel and Japanese musical instrument.
9 Ford Madox Brown: The Last of England (1852-55)
This famous emigration scene was inspired by the departure for Australia in 1852 of the PRB sculptor Thomas Woolner. A little older than the others, Brown was not a member of the PRB but was intimately associated with them. By eliminating the corners and emphasising the enclosing contours, he provides an almost telescopic focus on the apprehensive couple, whose baby is wrapped in the mother's shawl. The figures were based on Brown and his wife, Emma, along with their children Katty and Oliver. A long-suffering perfectionist, it took Brown three years to complete the picture.
10 Ford Madox Brown: An English Autumn Afternoon, Hampstead (1852-55)Even with the foreground figures, this is essentially a piece of pure landscape, representing a view over Hampstead Heath towards Highgate. Other PRB painters also succeeded in making an apparently uninspiring view compelling by a devotion to the most precise detail, rather than following the tradition of Constable by re-arranging the subject for pictorial effect. This baffled Ruskin, who liked some meaning in a picture and asked Brown why he had painted "such a very ugly subject". The artist replied, "Because it lay out of a back window."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/sep/12/10-best-pre-raphaelite-paintings
