Seemann, Leipzig.
DYCE.JACOB AND RACHEL.

Where the Nazarenes obtain a pallid, corpse-like effect, a deep and luminous quality of colour delights one in his pictures. He is essentially graceful, and with this grace he combines the pure and quiet simplicity of the Umbrian masters. There is something touching in certain of his Madonnas, who, in long, clinging raiment, appeal to the Godhead with arms half lifted, devout lips parted in prayer, and mild glances lost in infinity. A dreamy loveliness brings the heavenly figures nearer to us. Dyce expresses the magic of downcast lids with long, dark lashes. Like the Umbrians, he delights in the elasticity of slender limbs and the chaste grace of blossoming maiden beauty. Many German fresco painters have become celebrated who never achieved anything equal in artistic merit to the Westminster pictures of Dyce. Yet he is to be reckoned with the Flandrin-Overbeck family, since he gives a repetition of the young Raphael, though he certainly does it well; but he only imitates and has not improved upon him.

The pictures of another Scotchman, Sir Joseph Noël Paton, born in 1821, appear at a rather later date. Most of them—“The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania,” “The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania” in the Edinburgh Gallery, and his masterpiece, “The Fairy Queen”—have, from the æsthetic standpoint, little enjoyment to offer. The drawing is hard, the composition overladen, the colour scattered and motley. As in Ary Scheffer, all the figures have vapid, widely opened eyes. Elves, gnomes, women, knights, and fantastic rocks are crowded so tightly together that the frame scarcely holds them. But the loving study of nature in the separate parts is extraordinary. It is possible to give a botanical definition of each plant and each flower in the foreground, with so much character and such care has Paton executed every leaf and every blossom, even the tiny creeping things amid the meadow grass. Here and there a fresh ray of morning sun breaks through the light green and leaps from blade to blade. The landscapes of Albrecht Altdorfer are recalled to mind. Emancipation from empty, heroically impassioned emphasis, pantheistic adoration of nature, even a certain effort—unsuccessful indeed—after an independent sentiment for colour, are what his pictures seem to preach in their naïve angularity, their loving execution of detail, and their bright green motley.

This was the mood of the young artists who united to form the pre-Raphaelite group of 1848. They were students at the Royal Academy of from twenty to four-and-twenty years of age. The first of the group, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had already written some of his poems. The second, Holman Hunt, had still a difficulty in overcoming the opposition of his father, who was not pleased to see him giving up a commercial career. John Everett Millais, the youngest, had made most progress as a painter, and was one of the best pupils at the Academy. But they were contented neither by the artistic achievement of their teachers nor by the method of instruction. Etty, the most valued of them all, according to the account of Holman Hunt, painted mythological pictures, full of empty affectation; Mulready drew in a diluted fashion, and sacrificed everything to elegance; Maclise had fallen into patriotic banalities; Dyce had stopped short in his course and begun again when it was too late. Thus they had of necessity to provide their own training for themselves. All three worked in the same studio; and it so happened that one day—in 1847 or 1848—chance threw into their hands some engravings of Benozzo Gozzoli’s Campo-Santo frescoes in Pisa. Nature and truth—everything which they had dimly surmised, and had missed in the productions of English art—here they were. Overcome with admiration for the sparkling life, the intensity of feeling, and the vigorous form of these works, which did not even shrink from the consequences of ugliness, they were agreed in recognising that art had always stood on the basis of nature until the end of the fifteenth century, or, more exactly, until the year 1508, when Raphael left Florence to paint in the Vatican in Rome. Since then everything had gone wrong; art had stripped off the simple garment of natural truthfulness and fallen into conventional phrases, which in the course of centuries had become more and more empty and repellent by vapid repetition. Was it necessary that the persons in pictures should, to the end of the world, stand and move just as they had done a thousand times in the works of the Cinquecentisti? Was it necessary that human emotions—love, boldness, remorse, and renunciation—should always be expressed by the same turn of the head, the same lift of the eyebrows, the same gesture of the arms, and the same folded hands, which came into vogue through the Cinquecentisti? Where in nature are the rounded forms which Raphael, the first Classicist, borrowed from the antique? And in the critical moments of life do people really form themselves into such carefully balanced groups, with the one who chances to have on the finest clothes in the centre?

Annan, photo.
PATON.THE RECONCILIATION OF OBERON AND TITANIA.

From this reaction against the Cinquecentisti and against the shallow imitation of them, the title pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the secret, masonic sign P.R.B., which they added to their signatures upon their pictures, are rendered comprehensible. But whilst Dyce, to avoid the Cinquecentisti, imitated the Quattrocentisti, the title here is only meant to signify that these artists, like the Quattrocentisti, had determined to go back to the original source of real life. The Academy pupils Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt, together with the young sculptor Thomas Woolner, who had just left school, were at first the only members of the Brotherhood. Later the genre painter James Collinson, the painter and critic F. G. Stephens, and Rossetti’s brother, William Michael Rossetti, were admitted to the alliance.

HOLMAN HUNT.THE SCAPEGOAT.
(By Permission of Messrs. Henry Graves & Co., the owners of the copyright.)

Boldly they declared war against all conventional rules, described themselves as beginners and their pictures as attempts, and announced themselves to be, at any rate, sincere. The programme of their school was truth; not imitation of the old masters, but strict and keen study of nature such as the old masters had practised themselves. They were in reaction against the superficial dexterity of technique and the beauty of form and intellectual emptiness to which the English historical picture had fallen victim; they were in reaction against the trivial banality which disfigured English genre painting. In the representation of passion the true gestures of nature were to be rendered, without regard to grace and elegance, and without the stock properties of pantomime. The end for which they strove was to be true and not to create what was essentially untrue by a borrowed idealism which had an appearance of being sublime. In opposition to the negligent painting of the artists of their age, they demanded slavishly faithful imitation of the model by detail, carried out with microscopic exactness. Nothing was to be done without reverence for nature; every part of a picture down to the smallest blade or leaf was to be directly painted from the original. Even at the expense of total effect every picture was to be carried out in minutest detail. It was better to stammer than to make empty phrases. A young and vigorous art, such as had been in the fifteenth century, could win its way, as they believed, from this conception alone.

In all these points, in the revolt against the emptiness of the beauté suprême and the flowing lines of the accepted routine of composition, they were at one with Courbet and Millet. It was only in further developments that the French and English parted company; English realism received a specifically English tinge. Since every form of Classicism—for to this point they were led by the train of their ideas—declares the ideal completion of form, of physical presentment, to be its highest aim, the standard-bearers of realism were obliged to seek the highest aim of their art, founded exclusively on the study of nature, in the representation of moral and intellectual life, in a thoughtful form of spiritual creation. The blending of realism with profundity of ideas, of uncompromising truth to nature in form with philosophic and poetic substance, is of the very essence of the pre-Raphaelites. They are transcendental naturalists, equally widely removed from Classicism, which deals only with beautiful bodies, as from realism proper, which only proposes to represent a fragment of nature. From opposition to abstract beauty of form they insist upon what is characteristic, energetic, angular; but their figures painted faithfully from nature are the vehicles of a metaphysical idea. From the first they saturated themselves with poetry. Holman Hunt has an enthusiasm for Keats and the Bible, Rossetti for Dante, Millais for the mediæval poems of chivalry.