A Text-Book of the History of Painting

by John C. Van Dyke

Perhaps the most important movement in English painting of recent times was that which took the name of

PRE-RAPHAELITISM: It was started about 1847, primarily by Rossetti (1828-1882), Holman Hunt (1827-), and Sir John Millais (1829-1896), associated with several sculptors and poets, seven in all. It was an emulation of the sincerity, the loving care, and the scrupulous exactness in truth that characterized the Italian painters before Raphael. Its advocates, including Mr. Ruskin the critic, maintained that after Raphael came that fatal facility in art which seeking grace of composition lost truth of fact, and that the proper course for modern painters was to return to the sincerity and veracity of the early masters. Hence the name pre-Raphaelitism, and the signatures on their early pictures, P. R. B., pre-Raphaelite Brother. To this attempt to gain the true regardless of the sensuous, was added a morbidity of thought mingled with mysticism, a moral and religious pose, and a studied simplicity. Some of the painters of the Brotherhood went even so far as following the habits of the early Italians, seeking retirement from the world and carrying with them a Gothic earnestness of air. There is no doubt about the sincerity that entered into this movement. It was an honest effort to gain the true, the good, and as a result, the beautiful; but it was no less a striven-after honesty and an imitated earnestness. The Brotherhood did not last for long, the members drifted from each other and began to paint each after his own style, and pre-Raphaelitism passed away as it had arisen, though not without leaving a powerful stamp on English art, especially in decoration.

Rossetti, an Italian by birth though English by adoption, was the type of the Brotherhood. He was more of a poet than a painter, took most of his subjects from Dante, and painted as he wrote, in a mystical romantic spirit. He was always of a retiring disposition and never exhibited publicly after he was twenty-eight years of age. As a draughtsman he was awkward in line and not always true in modelling. In color he was superior to his associates and had considerable decorative feeling. The shortcoming of his art, as with that of the others of the Brotherhood, was that in seeking truth of detail he lost truth of ensemble. This is perhaps better exemplified in the works of Holman Hunt. He has spent infinite pains in getting the truth of detail in his pictures, has travelled in the East and painted types, costumes, and scenery in Palestine to gain the historic truths of his Scriptural scenes; but all that he has produced has been little more than a survey, a report, a record of the facts. He has not made a picture. The insistence upon every detail has isolated all the facts and left them isolated in the picture. In seeking the minute truths he has overlooked the great truths of light, air, and setting. His color has always been crude, his values or relations not well preserved, and his brush-work hard and tortured.

Millais showed some of this disjointed effect in his early work when he was a member of the Brotherhood. He did not hold to his early convictions however, and soon abandoned the pre-Raphaelite methods for a more conventional style. He has painted some remarkable portraits and some excellent figure pieces, and to-day holds high rank in English art; but he is an uneven painter, often doing weak, harshly-colored work. Moreover, the English tendency to tell stories with the paint-brush finds in Millais a faithful upholder. At his best he is a strong painter.

Madox Brown (1821-1893) never joined the Brotherhood, though his leaning was toward its principles. He had considerable dramatic power, with which he illustrated historic scenes, and among contemporary artists stood well. The most decided influence of pre-Raphaelitism shows in Burne-Jones (1833-), a pupil of Rossetti, and perhaps the most original painter now living[18] of the English school. From Rossetti he got mysticism, sentiment, poetry, and from association with Swinburne and William Morris, the poets, something of the literary in art, which he has put forth with artistic effect. He has not followed the Brotherhood in its pursuit of absolute truth of fact, but has used facts for decorative effect in line and color. His ability to fill a given space gracefully, shows with fine results in his pictures, as in his stained-glass designs. He is a good draughtsman and a rather rich colorist, but in brush-work somewhat labored, stippled, and unique in dryness. He is a man of much imagination, and his conceptions, though illustrative of literature, do not suffer thereby, because his treatment does not sacrifice the artistic. He has been the butt of considerable shallow laughter from time to time, like many another man of power. Albert Moore (1840-1893), a graceful painter of a decorative ideal type, rather follows the Rossetti-Burne-Jones example, and is an illustration of the influence of pre-Raphaelitism.

[18] Died 1898.

OTHER FIGURE AND PORTRAIT PAINTERS: Among the contemporary painters Sir Frederick Leighton (1830-1896), President of the Royal Academy, is ranked as a fine academic draughtsman, but not a man with the color-sense or the brushman's quality in his work. Watts (1818-1904) is perhaps an inferior technician, and in color is often sombre and dirty; but he is a man of much imagination, occasionally rises to grandeur in conception, and has painted some superb portraits, notably the one of Walter Crane. Orchardson (1835-) is more of a painter, pure and simple, than any of his contemporaries, and is a knowing if somewhat mannered colorist. Erskine Nicol (1825-), Faed[19] (1826-), Calderon (1833-), Boughton (1834-1905), Frederick Walker (1840-1875), Stanhope Forbes, Stott of Oldham and in portraiture Holl (1845-1890) and Herkomer may be mentioned.

[19] Died 1900.