Pre-Raphaelite Paintings and the Victorian Art of Millais and Rossetti

In 1848 three students at the Royal Academy agreed that English painting had been going wrong since Raphael. They were nineteen, twenty and twenty-one. The Pre-Raphaelite paintings they went on to make are the most conspicuous quarrel in Victorian art, and the quarrel was with the very tradition the previous century had worked so hard to establish.

What the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood objected to

The complaint of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was specific. Academic training taught composition through inherited formulae (the pyramid group, the balanced mass, the shadowed foreground pushing the eye back) and taught colour through a brown ground that unified a canvas by dulling all of it. Reynolds had codified much of this, and the Brotherhood's private nickname for him was Sir Sloshua.

Against it the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood set three rules that were practical, not theoretical: paint on a wet white ground so the colour stays bright; paint from the thing itself rather than from a studio convention; and give every part of the canvas the same attention, refusing the hierarchy that lets a background be sketched. The name was chosen to mean painting as it was done before Raphael made the formulae authoritative.

Reynolds died in 1792. The three young men who nicknamed him Sir Sloshua were born in the later 1820s and formed the Brotherhood in 1848, so the target of the complaint had been dead more than half a century when it was made. A timeline of the two centuries sets the painters and their dated works on one scale and shows how wide that gap really is.

Millais and the discipline of looking

Millais was the technician of the group and the one who took the rules most literally. Ophelia was painted in two halves: the river bank on the Hogsmill in Surrey, outdoors, over five months in 1851, and the figure afterwards in a London studio, with Elizabeth Siddal lying in a bath kept warm by lamps beneath it until the lamps went out and she caught cold.

The result is a picture in which the botany is exact enough to identify by species and the drowning woman is rendered with the same unblinking evenness as the willow behind her. That refusal to subordinate anything is what makes the painting uncomfortable, and it is what Millais meant by painting truthfully. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1853, five years after helping found a movement against it, and eventually became its President.

Rossetti and the turn away from nature

Rossetti went the other way. He was the worst-trained of the three and the least interested in the empirical programme; after the early years he more or less stopped painting from nature and built pictures out of literature, medieval poetry and a small number of faces he returned to obsessively. Proserpine is late Rossetti: a single half-length figure, a fruit, a shaft of light, and no landscape at all.

This is why the Brotherhood dissolved within five years. Rossetti's direction led to the Aesthetic movement and, through Morris and Burne-Jones, to the whole decorative reform of late Victorian art. Millais's led to the Academy presidency. Both were consistent with something the group had said in 1848; they were not consistent with each other. The Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the two men after 1860 have almost nothing in common.

Why Victorian art looked backwards

It is worth asking why the most industrially advanced country in the world produced a body of Victorian art preoccupied with the fifteenth century. Part of the answer is Ruskin, who defended the Brotherhood in The Times when the critics turned on them and who argued that Gothic building was morally superior because it left the workman free. Part of it is the Gothic Revival, which by 1850 had made medieval form the natural language for anything serious.

And part is straightforward reaction. A generation that could see what the factory did to work found the pre-industrial past useful, and painted it in the brightest colours available. Buildings like this one, genuinely fifteenth-century, never rebuilt into something else and still standing in a working town, were of intense interest to exactly these people, which is how a manor house in Lincolnshire and a movement in London come to belong on the same site.

How to look at Pre-Raphaelite paintings

Two habits help. The first is to read the surface before the story: Pre-Raphaelite paintings are built on a white ground, so the colour is lit from behind, not by a lamp in the picture, and the absence of deep shadow is a deliberate result and not an oversight. The second is to accept that the detail is not decoration. If a plant is identifiable, it was chosen; if a colour is startling, it was mixed to be.

The movement's weakness follows from the same discipline. Even attention across a canvas can leave a picture with no place for the eye to rest, and the literary subjects can be laboured. The pictures reward slow looking and punish a glance, which in a crowded gallery is a real cost.

Questions about the Pre-Raphaelites