LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
| PAGE | |
| The Day-dream | [Frontispiece] |
| Ecce Ancilla Domini | [78] |
| Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee | [116] |
| Pandora | [157] |
| Beata Beatrix | [162] |
| The Boat of Love | [180] |
| Head of Christ (Study for “Mary Magdalene”) | [214] |
| Our Lady of Pity | [256] |
DANTE ROSSETTI AND THE
PRE-RAPHAELITE
MOVEMENT.
CHAPTER I.
THE PREPARATION FOR REFORM IN ART.
Constable prophesies the Decay of English Art—The new Impulse from Italy—The English Renaissance of 1850—Rossetti and the Specialistic Temperament—Classicism of the Eighteenth Century—Influence of the French Revolution—Revival of Romance—Distinction between Mediæval and Modern Romance—Pessimism in Pre-Raphaelite Painting—Nature as a Background—Moral Significance of the Change.
A study of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England at the zenith of the nineteenth century opens up perhaps a wider field for controversy in the ethics of art than is afforded by any other phase of modern painting. Between the ridicule which, for the most part, greeted Rossetti’s first picture, “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” in 1849, and the enthusiastic homage which exalted him, thirty years later, to the dominance not merely of a school, but almost of a religion, lies a ground of infinite question and dispute, still awaiting the historian who shall adjust the issues of the strife to the main thought-current of the period.
“In thirty years,” said Constable in 1821, “English art will have ceased to exist.”
The words were significant of that first stirring of weariness and discontent which precedes either a collapse or a revolution. It was impossible that the conventions of the eighteenth century, persisting in pictorial art long after they had been cast off by literature, should suffice for an age which had wholly outgrown the conceptions of life on which they were founded. Landscape and portraiture, however enriched by the last gleams of a flickering classicism in the genius of a Turner, a Lawrence, or a Constable, were still in the “bondage of corruption” to traditional schools. Turner, indeed, is too great to be bracketed with his contemporaries, or with the pioneers of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. He stands as much alone as Titian. But the thrall of the conventional, of the accepted canons of what should be perceived and conceived, and how things ought to look in pictures, lay yet upon English art. One other painter, a solitary and uncouth herald of the new day, holds a unique position in that transition period. Blake alone, working his fantastic will like a sanctified Rabelais run riot in all supernal things, discerned weird glimpses of the coming light; such glimpses as Chatterton, in the world of poetry, caught brokenly before the neo-romantic dawn.