But Ruskin’s championship of Hunt and Millais when the powers of orthodoxy were against them and their friends were few, and his no less generous patronage of Rossetti in the succeeding years, did much to turn the current of critical favour in the direction of the Pre-Raphaelite ideal. Hunt’s picture, “Valentine and Sylvia,” after its merciless ordeal of ridicule and abuse in London, was rewarded by a £50 prize at the Academy of Liverpool,—the first English city to give public recognition and support to the rising school. The story of the steadfast encouragement accorded to the Pre-Raphaelites by the Liverpool Academy during the next six years, in which the annual prize of £50 was granted in every instance to pictures either by Millais, Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown, or a painter of kindred aims—Mark Anthony,—and of the dissensions which arose in and round the Academic Council when in 1857 the prize was once more won by Millais, affords an interesting side light upon the artistic controversy of the period. A leading literary newspaper attacked the Liverpool Academy in the bitterest terms for what it called “the Pre-Raphaelite heresy,” and Mr. Ruskin again came forward in the press to the defence of the painters. In the following year another nomination of Madox Brown by the Council for the award in question brought the strife to a crisis; the Town Council withdrew its financial support from the Academy, and rival exhibitions were opened, resulting in failure on both sides. Time, however, worked a significant revenge. Not long after the press attack upon the Academy Council, one of the original members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Mr. F.G. Stephens, was appointed art-critic of the very journal that had so violently forsworn “the Pre-Raphaelite heresy.” Twenty years later, the finest English art gallery outside London was erected in Liverpool through the munificence of Mr. (afterwards Sir) A.B. Walker, recently deceased; and yielded some of the most important spaces on its walls to pictures of the highest level of the English Pre-Raphaelite school.

The history of the last two decades has indeed wrought a sufficient vindication of the general methods of these young painters, and supremely of their practice as colourists; and it is in the sphere of the colourist that their influence upon contemporary art has made itself felt more deeply, perhaps, than in any other branch of technique. But to the vindication of history has been added in recent years, by the painter most bitterly attacked at the time for his innovations in colour—Sir John Millais—a defence which has now become almost an aphorism in English studios. “Time and Varnish are two of the greatest Old Masters,” says the artist, writing in 1888 under the title “Some Thoughts on our Art of To-day”; “and their merits are too often attributed by critics to the painters of the pictures they have toned and mellowed. The great artists all painted in bright colours, such as it is the fashion now-a-days for men to decry as crude and vulgar, never suspecting that what they applaud in those works is merely the result of what they condemn in their contemporaries. The only way to judge of the treasures which the old masters of whatever age have left us, is to look at the work and ask oneself ‘What was that like when it was new?’ Take the ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ in the National Gallery, with its splendid red robe and its rich brown grass. You may rest assured that the painter of that red robe never painted the grass brown. He saw the colour as it was and painted it as it was—distinctly green; only it has faded with time to its present beautiful mellow colour. Yet many men now-a-days will not have a picture with green in it; some even going so far, in giving a commission, as to stipulate that the canvas shall contain none of it. But God Almighty has given us green, and you may depend upon it, it’s a fine colour.”[[4]]

The writer then describes the gradual fall of Sir Joshua Reynolds before the short-sighted demand for “subdued colour” which had become current among the art connoisseurs of his day, and which at last induced him, against his better judgment, to create immediate “tone,” at the sacrifice of durability, by the use of that pernicious medium, asphaltum; with the result that all his extant work so accomplished is now in a deplorable state of decomposition and ruin.

With such examples before them of the evil of yielding to the demands of ignorance, and lowering in any way one’s standard of practice before a popular cry, the Pre-Raphaelite Brothers, whose first word in art sounded, as Ruskin said, the note of resistance and defiance, did not scruple to make merry over the weaknesses of a school of painting founded on Sir Joshua Reynold’s “Discourses.” Mr. Madox Brown tells us how Rossetti loved to quote from the diary of B.R. Haydon:—“Locked my door and dashed at my picture with a brush dripping with asphaltum.” But of Rossetti’s cordial admiration for Haydon’s genius a contrasting anecdote is evidence:—A friend, discussing with him the relative merits of Haydon and Wilkie, contended that the head of Lazarus was the only fine thing Haydon ever produced. “Ah!” burst out Rossetti, “but that one head is worth all the puny Wilkie ever produced in his life!”

Rossetti’s practice, it may here be said, differed from that of his Pre-Raphaelite comrades in the matter of varnish. The strong impulse towards the fresco-method, which was initiated in him, in his student days, by Madox Brown and the Westminster Cartoon competitions, resulted in his avoidance, throughout the best years of his work, of glaze and sheen in painting. From the first, Rossetti hated varnish: hence were developed the fresco-like, pure, and lustreless depths of colour which mark his finest technical level. But his entire confidence in the “Old Master,” Time, to enhance and vindicate his rich green glories in drapery and background is sufficiently attested by his unhesitating and masterly use of green in nearly all his greatest pictures. Not even the verdant gorgeousness of “Ferdinand and Ariel” can compare with the deep, chastened splendour of the green in “Beata Beatrix” and “Mnemosyne,” or in “The Beloved,” “Veronica Veronese,” “La Ghirlandata,” “The Blue Bower,” or, more daring still, in the wonderful series of water-colours which occupy the transition period of Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite work.

CHAPTER IV.
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.