Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement

by Esther Wood

Moreover, it was at Oxford that the Pre-Raphaelite movement, five or six years earlier, had found some of its first and most generous patrons; such as Mr. James Wyatt, the well-known picture-dealer, who was among Millais’s readiest buyers, but died in 1853, and Mr. Thomas Combe, the University printer, who, through Millais’s influence, purchased Holman Hunt’s youthful and little-known picture, “Christian Priests Escaping from Druid Persecution,” in 1850. About three years later, Holman Hunt was on a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Combe while his greater work, “The Light of the World,” was in process; and at their house he became acquainted with the young curate of St. Paul’s, Oxford; Venables by name. He was a man saintly in face and character; afterwards Bishop of the Bahamas, and long since dead. Whether he actually gave sittings to Hunt, or was avowedly the model for the Christ of the picture, does not appear, but those who knew Venables at the time insist upon the absolute faithfulness of the portraiture. This face it was which certain critics, unable to dissociate their conception of the Saviour from the conventional Raphaelesque type, condemned instantly as “the face of a Judas.” The picture was purchased by Mr. Combe, and subsequently presented by his widow to Keble College, Oxford, where it hangs to-day. Of the difficulties which attended the painting, and of the extraordinary labour bestowed upon it as it slowly grew beneath his hand in the little studio then at Chelsea, Mr. Hunt has given us his own significant record,—how, night after night, when the moon was in a favourable quarter, he would so dispose his curtains and draperies, easels and lamps, as to yield him the peculiar light for which he was striving, and at the same time to afford for curious observers an endless speculation as to the mysterious proceedings of the eccentric young artist within. “The Light of the World” is now perhaps the most familiar, to English eyes, of any Pre-Raphaelite pictures, unless we except the less esoteric “Hugenot” of Millais.

The “Hugenot,” indeed, would undoubtedly be taken by general estimate to point the high-water mark of Millais’s fame and genius, in spite of the splendour of the “ninth wave”—if one may push the metaphor so far—which issued ten years later in “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “The Enemy Sowing Tares.” The “Hugenot” appeared with “Ophelia” in 1852; Hunt’s “Light of the World” in 1854. And the “Hugenot” it was that first took unmistakable hold upon the public taste, and created a higher taste than it appealed to, carrying the emotion awakened with it on to higher planes than had yet been reached in English criticism. “The Order of Release,” in the following year, consummated the triumph of the young painter, and was enhanced in fame by Kingsley’s allusion to it in “Two Years Ago.” “The Proscribed Royalist” and the “Portrait of Ruskin” may be regarded as the last products of Millais’s rigidly Pre-Raphaelite period, which terminated, with Rossetti’s, about 1853. “The Rescue” and “The Random Shot,” or “L’Enfant du Regiment,” in 1855, “Sir Isumbras at the Ford: A Dream of the Past,” or “Knight Crossing a Ford,” in 1857, and “The Vale of Rest,” in 1858, are purely transitional works, while, with the notable exception of the two later masterpieces specified above, “The Black Brunswicker” of 1860, may be said to mark the final merging of the Pre-Raphaelite heretic into the popular Royal Academician. His formal election as R.A. took place in 1863. He was made, in 1883, a member of the Institute of France, and was, in 1885, the first English artist to be offered and to accept a baronetcy of the United Kingdom. He has also become a member of the Academies of Edinburgh, Antwerp, Rome and Madrid, and has been honoured at Oxford with the complimentary degree of D.C.L. His marriage in early life with Miss Euphemia Chalmers Gray was anticipated in one of the most pleasing of his female portraits in 1853.

Meanwhile the companion of his student days had entered upon a path of more obscure and arduous toil, in the pursuit of an ideal too exalted to endure compromise with any standards of the merely picturesque, or to lend itself readily to fluent and attractive expression. The work of Holman Hunt, among all the Pre-Raphaelite painters, has remained the most consistent and exclusive in its aims and methods, and the least affected by surrounding influences, either from his comrades or from the critical world. His artistic development has been the most faithful to its origins, and has presented the most unbroken continuity of thought and sentiment in its progress from the first “note of resistance and defiance” to the larger harmony of maturer years. The boundaries of his transition-period are more difficult to define than in the case of Millais and Rossetti; but, at the same time, the pictures that issued from his studio while Rossetti was dabbling in experimental water-colours, and Millais compromising brilliantly between original genius and the sweet laxities of fame, were of a passion and mastery which he never exceeded. Before the completion of “The Light of the World,” in 1854, Hunt had already painted “The Awakening Conscience” (1853), “Claudio and Isabella” (1851), “The Hireling Shepherd” (1852), and “The Strayed Sheep,” called also “Our English Coasts” (1853). He now departed to commence those long, solitary, and most fruitful sojourns in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and less frequented parts of Palestine, which gave us, at the cost of years of intense and continuous labour, such great imaginative creations as “The Scapegoat” in 1855, “Christ in the Temple” in 1860, “The Shadow of Death” in 1874, and “The Triumph of the Innocents” in 1885. “The Shadow of Death” was purchased for £10,500; a price unparalleled for the work of any other living painter. The picture now hangs in the Manchester Corporation Gallery. Seven years were spent over “The Triumph of the Innocents,” pronounced by Ruskin to be “the greatest religious picture of the age.” The final version, completed in 1885, has recently been acquired by the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, where it completes, with Millais’s “Lorenzo and Isabella” and Rossetti’s “Dante’s Dream,” a noble trio of the best Pre-Raphaelite type. Reverting, as he did but once, to more purely romantic subjects, and to that haunting theme of Keats which first inspired the young Brotherhood, Mr. Holman Hunt produced in 1867 the finest of his work in that direction, in the brilliant “Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” which was the outcome of a visit to Florence in that year. His only important picture of later years has been the “May Morning on Magdalen Tower,” a fascinating reminiscence of Oxford life, exhibited in 1889.

Even more obscure and remote from the general routine of the modern studio, more independent of criticism or of patronage, was the earnest and thoughtful work of Madox Brown. In his case the early discipline of art study, and the isolation of unconventional ideals, had been courageously survived before he knew Rossetti, and his path already chosen on the heights of original thought. “He was,” says Mr. W.M. Rossetti, “distinctly an intellectual painter; intellectual on the side chiefly of human character. The predominant quality in all his works is a vigorous thinking out of the subject, especially as a matter of character, and of dramatic incident and expression thus resulting. This is the sort of intellect peculiarly demanded by pictorial art.”

It is noticeable also that the two senior members, if they may be so claimed, of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, though not of the actual Brotherhood—Ford Madox Brown and George Frederick Watts—were the only painters who brought into the movement any direct training from the continental schools. The latter, one year older than Madox Brown, was born in London in 1820, and succeeded in getting a picture into the Royal Academy as early as 1837. The prize of £300 gained in 1843 in the Westminster Hall Competitions enabled him to spend three years in Italy, after which, on his return, he won a prize of £500 in the same contest, with two more colossal frescoes of a similar kind.

Madox Brown, meanwhile, was entering upon the more uncompromising phase of reform. It was during his studies in Rome and Paris, when the Gothic traditions of Belgium had been strongly tempered by the Latin heritage of the south, that the Pre-Raphaelite idea began to shape itself in his mind, and to develop in him an original art which should create its own conditions and methods, yield a rich harvest of artistic if not of professional success, and exercise an immense power for good over the movement which his own single-handed battle with convention largely stimulated and inspired.

“Wicliff Reading his Translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt” was afterwards acknowledged by Madox Brown as his first distinctly Pre-Raphaelite picture; begun in 1845, and shortly followed by “Pretty Baa-Lambs”—the only other work which the artist claimed as being painted implicitly in the early Italian style. The latter was subjected to much derisive criticism in the press. Yet the later work of this unquestionably great painter, maintained as it was on his own rigidly independent lines, and never merging into the fervid neo-Romanticism of Rossetti, Millais, and Hunt, may justly be accepted, like theirs at its best, as a consistent and superb development, in a modern atmosphere and in the face of modern problems, of the principles followed by the Italian Pre-Raphaelites, and which as principles are adaptible in infinite variety to the fresh needs and new perplexities of successive generations of men.

In 1849 the work of Madox Brown appeared for the first time beside that of Rossetti. “Cordelia’s Portion,” a highly imaginative and nobly dramatic composition, was hung in the Free Exhibition at Hyde Park Corner, in company with Rossetti’s “Girlhood of Mary Virgin.” His next important picture, “Chaucer at the Court of Edward III.,” occupied the painter for several years, and was produced at the Royal Academy of 1851—the memorable season of Hunt’s “Valentine and Sylvia,” and Millais’s “Woodman’s Daughter.” The “Chaucer,” now in Australia, received the Liverpool Academy’s annual prize of £50 in 1852, and was selected by Government for the Paris Exhibition Loan Collection of English paintings in 1855.

The departure of his young friend Woolner for Australia in 1854 suggested to Madox Brown the subject of his most popular and in some respects his most successful picture, “The Last of England,” finished in 1855, and now exhibited in the Art Gallery of the Corporation of Birmingham. It was his visit to Gravesend, to bid farewell to Woolner as he embarked for the Antipodes, at the time when the emigration movement was at its height, that inspired the elder painter with that homely idyll of emigrant life—that masterpiece in the dramatic and emotional presentment of modern and familiar romance. In 1857 he painted his great symbolic picture “Work,” which has been pronounced “the finest Pre-Raphaelite picture in the world;” a verdict not without justification, but bordering on those facile abstractions of criticism wherein the sense of comparative excellence is apt to lose itself in the confusion of diverse methods in art. The picture now hangs with the masterpieces of Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt, in the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool. Among the many friends of that period who gave sittings to the artist for the principal figures were Frederick Denison Maurice and Thomas Carlyle.

Of the achievements of Madox Brown in the more obviously romantic and naturalistic fields, perhaps the best known is the intensely passionate and brilliant “Romeo and Juliet” parting at daybreak in the loggia to Juliet’s chamber. In the same category, though of various range and style, may be briefly mentioned “Waiting” (1855), a fine study of firelight and lamplight, which appeared in the Russell Place Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition of 1856, “The Death of Sir Tristram,” “King René’s Honeymoon,” the much earlier “Parisina and Manfred on Jungfrau,” and “The Dream of Sardanapalus,” a work of recent years. The romantic treatment of historical subjects is represented by the cartoons before mentioned, executed prior to 1848, and by such later compositions as “Cromwell Dictating to his Secretaries,” “Milton and Marvel,” and “Cromwell on his farm at St. Ives,” completed in 1873. Of his religious pictures perhaps the most familiar is the austerely beautiful “Entombment;” but it is not easy to excuse the discreditable oblivion permitted in this country to such paintings as “Jesus Washes Peter’s Feet,” “The Transfiguration,” “Our Lady of Good Children,” or “Elijah and the Widow’s Son;”—oblivion only too explicable by a single trait of national character: that the average Briton will accept any innovation of taste or doctrine that will allow him to take his pleasure with the least amount of intellectual disturbance, but he will never forgive the artist who calls upon him to think. Happily some worthier, though very far from adequate, recognition has been accorded to the almost colossal task of the painter’s later years—the great series of historical frescoes on the walls of the Town Hall, Manchester, commencing with the building of Manchester by the Romans, and bringing the history of the city pictorially down to the present day. Outliving many younger leaders of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Madox Brown died on the 6th of October, 1893.