Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement

by Esther Wood

“Ferdinand Lured by Ariel” may be taken as the first landscape produced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It was painted—according to the rule—directly from nature. The background was taken from a spot in a park attached to Shotover House, near Oxford, where Millais was staying as the guest of Mr. Drury. A lady who saw the young artist at work upon this subject distinctly recalls his application of a magnifying-glass to the branch of a tree he was painting, in order to study closely the veins of the leaves. This was a literal following of that patient analysis of minutiæ in nature which characterized the Italian Pre-Raphaelites, and is especially noticeable in the early landscapes of Leonardo da Vinci; though he departed in his maturity from his former love of detail, and began to conventionalize items into generalities. Even the lizards in the foreground of “Ferdinand and Ariel” were faithful portraits of certain small favourites brought by Millais from Jersey to serve their turn among his sitters. The friend who sat for Ferdinand relates that the painting of the face, though a marvel of finish, and perfect in technique, was accomplished in a single sitting. A detailed pencil drawing was already on the canvas, and the laying on of the colour occupied only five hours. The vivid colouring of the whole picture, and the use of metal instead of pigment for the gold-cloth worn by Ferdinand (after the method of the early Italian masters, followed also by Rossetti in “Ecce Ancilla Domini”), were the subject of scarcely less vehement denunciation by the critics than the painter’s treatment of the Holy Family. “We do not want,” they said, “to see Ariel and the Spirits of the enchanted isle in the attitudes and shapes of green goblins, or the gallant Ferdinand twisted like a posture-master by Albrecht Dürer.... A Ferdinand of most ignoble physiognomy is being lured by a pea-green monster, intended for Ariel, whilst a row of sprites, such as it takes a Millais to devise, watch the operation with turquoise eyes. It would occupy more room than the thing is worth to expose all the absurdity and impertinence of this work.”

“Ecce Ancilla Domini!”
From the National Gallery.

From such extravagance of hostility the efforts of Holman Hunt were spared for the present; and his contribution to the Academy of 1850, “Christian Priests Escaping from Druid Persecution” (better known as “The Christian Missionary,”) though sharing in the general condemnation of the Pre-Raphaelite “heresy and schism,” was not singled out for special objurgation. Rossetti’s great achievement of the year was the most beautiful, and at the same time the most dramatic, of his strictly Pre-Raphaelite work, the “Ecce Ancilla Domini” (“The Annunciation,”) now in the National Gallery. The first rough sketch for this picture—a small water-colour not more than six inches by four—was painted as early as 1847 in the Cleveland Street studio shared with Hunt. The completed work was rejected by the Academy, and seen only in the obscure little Portland Gallery in Regent Street.

But the following season brought a larger measure of opprobrium to Holman Hunt. In the autumn of 1850 he had spent some weeks with Rossetti at Sevenoaks, Kent, and there painted the greater portion of his picture for the next year’s Academy, “Valentine rescuing Sylvia from Proteus;” a scene from Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” The beech-tree forest background was painted in Lord Amherst’s park at Knowle, and Mr. James Lennox Hannay (who died in 1873) was the model for Valentine. The whole work was characterized by the same bold colouring and exuberance of highly wrought detail, the same rugged unconventionality of pose and gesture in the composition of the figures, that had so incensed the organs of Academic tradition in the previous year. Its appearance in the Academy of 1851 evoked a fresh outburst of official contumely, in which the painter of “Valentine and Sylvia” (as it was ultimately called), was no less severely dealt with than his comrade Millais, who exhibited at the same time “The Return of the Dove to the Ark,” “Mariana of the Moated Grange,” and “The Woodman’s Daughter”—one of the finest combinations of Pre-Raphaelite landscape with the peculiar intensity of figure-drawing and character-study which was a dominant motive with the Brotherhood at this period. The assailant critics again sought to cover insinuations of gracelessness and deformity of conception beneath the looser charge of defective technique.

It was at this juncture that Mr. Ruskin, then personally unknown to the Pre-Raphaelites, and hearing privately of their aims and endeavours through Mr. Coventry Patmore, took upon himself to espouse their cause, perhaps with more ardour than discrimination, and wrote, in the spring of 1851, the now famous Letters to the “Times” which constituted the first public and authoritative vindication of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

That Mr. Ruskin may have taken the early achievement and promise of the young painters a little too seriously, and attributed to them a more exalted conception of their mission as prophets and reformers than they actually cherished, and that he did undoubtedly misinterpret certain aspects of their religious paintings, is now widely acknowledged; nor need we hesitate to say that his influence upon the movement from first to last has been considerably exaggerated. Yet it is unquestionable that the first inspiration of Pre-Raphaelitism was largely due to his writings, and that his open championship of Hunt and Millais at a crisis of popular feeling rendered immense service to their crusade against the blind Philistinism of the British bourgeoisie. Replying at once to the technical indictments, Mr. Ruskin said:—“There was not a single error in perspective in three out of the four pictures in question [‘The Woodman’s Daughter,’ ‘Mariana of the Moated Grange,’ ‘The Return of the Dove to the Ark,’ and ‘Valentine and Sylvia’].... I doubt if, with the exception of the pictures of David Roberts, there were one architectural drawing in perspective on the walls of the Academy; I never met with but two men in my life who knew enough of perspective to draw a Gothic arch in a retiring plane, so that its lateral dimensions and curvatures might be calculated to scale from the drawing. Our architects certainly do not, and it was but the other day that, talking to one of the most distinguished among them, I found he actually did not know how to draw a circle in perspective.... There is not a single study of drapery in the whole Academy, be it in large works or small, which for perfect truth, power, and finish, could be compared with the black sleeve of Julia, or with the velvet on the breast and the chain mail of Valentine, of Mr. Hunt’s picture; or with the white draperies on the table of Mr. Millais’s ‘Mariana.’ And further: that as studies both of drapery and of every minor detail, there has been nothing in art so earnest or so complete as these pictures since the days of Albrecht Dürer. This I assert generally and fearlessly.” “Let us only look around at our exhibitions,”—continued the writer, proceeding to compare the work of the Pre-Raphaelites with the current standard of academic art—“and behold the cattle-pieces, and sea-pieces, and fruit-pieces, and family-pieces, the eternal brown cows in ditches, and white sails in squalls, and sliced lemons in saucers, and foolish faces in simpers, and try and feel what we are, and what we might have been.”

Mr. Ruskin’s letters to the “Times” were revised and republished a few years later in pamphlet form, introduced by the following statement in the preface:—“Eight years ago, in the close of the first volume of ‘Modern Painters,’ I ventured to give this advice to the young artists of England: That they should go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her, laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing: advice which, whether bad or good, involved infinite labour and humiliation in the following it; and was therefore, for the most part, rejected. It has, however, at last been carried out, to the very letter, by a group of men who, for their reward, have been assailed with the most scurrilous abuse which I ever recollect seeing issue from the public press.”

Upon this endorsement of the Pre-Raphaelite aim there followed an indictment of the Raphaelesque tradition still surviving in the training-schools of British art, in a passage which, through much quotation, has now become a familiar example of the controversial literature of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. “We begin,” said Mr. Ruskin, “in all probability, by telling the youth of fifteen or sixteen that Nature is full of faults, and that he is to improve her; but that Raphael is perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the better; that after much copying of Raphael he is to try what he can do himself in a Raphaelesque but yet original manner; that is to say, he is to try to do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet this clever something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules, is to have a principal light, occupying one-seventh of its space, and a principal shadow, occupying one-third of the same; that no two people’s heads in the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the personages represented are to possess ideal beauty of the highest order, which ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly in proportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and the chin; but partly also in that degree of improvement which the youth of sixteen is to bestow upon God’s work in general.”

It is not difficult to trace, in the light of those utterances, the point of departure between Mr. Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites in their conception of that universe of Nature which they had studied with the like faithful care. Revolting from the quasi-perfection of Raphaelesque art, Ruskin had thrown himself upon Nature with the confidence of finding in her the absolute perfection vainly sought in the work of man. He had embraced without question the monistic theory of Nature as essentially beneficent and beautiful, and had never faced the principal of dualism which has been and must yet remain the crux of modern philosophy. Hence he failed to grasp the more romantic and subtle conception of the physical world as the scene, and not the drama, of life, which was immanent in the beginnings and revealed with the maturity of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. It has been remarked by an astute critic that three of the greatest writers of the Victorian age—Ruskin, Carlyle, and Browning—have been ruined as thinkers by their ignorance of the law of Evolution, with all that it implies of waste and suffering, of sacrifice and conflict and loss. Ruskin’s philosophy of nature was founded upon an old and discredited cosmogony; and however remote may have been the thought of the Pre-Raphaelite painters from the purely intellectual conclusions of physical and mental science in the nineteenth century, however apart they may have lived from theological and ethical controversy, it can safely be said that no contemporary artist save Tennyson, in poetry or painting, has imbibed more completely that spirit of mystical and irresponsible conflict with Nature which they drew from the atmosphere of mediæval romance. They understood that he who returns to Nature, returns, as another writer has bluntly expressed it, to a great many ugly things. “We need,” says Mr. Frederic Harrison, “as little think the natural world all beauty as think it all horror. It is made up of loveliness and ghastliness, of harmony and chaos, of agony, joy, life, death. The nature-worshippers are blind and deaf to the waste and the shrieks which meet the seeker after truth. What a mass there is in Nature which is appalling—almost maddening to man, if we coolly resolve to look at all the facts, as facts!”[^[3]] It was well that the Pre-Raphaelite painters should return, as they did, to the reverent and unbiassed portrayal of the natural world as it presented itself to their eyes. That they should follow with absolute fidelity the phenomena around them, “rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing,” was the essential preparation for artistic reform. But that they should advance from such a discipline to something of the selectiveness of fine art, was a step from the analytic method to a constructive effort based on that analysis and not—as in the Raphaelesque convention—independent of it. In all the highest Pre-Raphaelite work we feel instinctively that Nature is not the subject, but only the accessory, of the painting. Undoubtedly the new note struck in 1849 was, as Ruskin says, a note of resistance and defiance. But the revolutionary impulse had yet to be developed on reconstructive lines; and this development, though powerfully stimulated by the independent genius of Millais in the first four years of the Brotherhood, passed ultimately into the hands of Rossetti and Holman Hunt.