Transcription
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the pre- rafalik Brotherhood brought
notoriety to British art in the 19th
century bursting into the spotlight in
the mid-century they shocked their peers
with a new kind of radical
art this program explores the origins of
the Brotherhood their initial
achievements and the centuries of Dogma
their paintings overturned
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for many the idea of prolite art is
informed by images of luscious
long-haired women or of sentimental
chocolate box
children but the brotherhood's early
work was very different from these later
works associated with
them their first paintings contra
versally applied a bold new realism to
Sacred
subjects and then a decade before the
French Impressionists their brushes
captured insalubrious subjects from
urban
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life such was the outrage that their
work caused one eminent Victorian
dedicated the front page of his magazine
to the venting of his
disgust you behold hold the interior of
a carpenter's shop in the foreground of
that carpenter shop is a hideous R
necked blubbering redheaded boy in a bed
gown who appears to have received a poke
in the hand from The Stick of another
boy with whom he has been playing in an
adjacent Gutter and to be holding it up
for the contemplation of a kneeling
woman so horrible in her ugliness that
you would stand out from the rest of the
company as a monster in the viest
Cabaret in France or the lowest gin in
England wherever it is possible to
express ugliness of feature Lim or
attitude you have it
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expressed the year was 1850 the critic
was the darling of the nation Charles
Dickens and the painter in question was
the 21-year-old praly John Everett
mle his picture Christ in the house of
his parents showed Christ in his
father's Workshop it was painted to PR
spoke but it had not
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failed they were all very young still
only about 20 and they wanted to make
their Mark you know they wanted it all
Fame riches girls whatever they could
get and what they wanted was Revolution
the Brotherhood was founded in 1848 when
revolution of a different kind was
spreading across Europe and KL Marx
published his Communist Manifesto
fired by the political turmoil around
them John Everett mle and two fellow
students at the prestigious Royal
Academy school William Holman hunt then
age
21 and Dante Gabriel Rosetti 20 decided
to overturn British
art they all had a similar aim and they
they were all rather dissatisfied with
the teaching they were receiving at the
the academy and they wanted to work as
part of a group and get inspiration from
their peers
they all agreed that during the early
19th century British art had become lazy
predictable and boring so they
sympathized with the art scholar John
Ruskin when he complained of the Eternal
brown cows in ditches and white sails in
squalls and sliced lemons in
sauces and foolish faces in
simpers it's important to remember that
the prite group was interested in
literature and poetry um as much as
visual art from the very
start so in a move to restore meaning to
Art they decided to paint moral
significant subjects drawn from
literature and the
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Bible and they reversed the sterile
academic tradition they had all been
encouraged to emulate at the Royal
Academy of form color and composition as
embodied in the work of the 16th century
artist
Raphael but as hunt complained why
should the composition be always apexed
in
pyramids why should the highest light
always be on the principal
figure why make one corner of the
picture always in the
shade mle hunt and Rosetti set up a
group that would offer an alternative to
this Academy dogma and recruited four
other like-minded thinkers including
Rosetti's brother William who wrote we
were really like brothers continuing
together and confiding to one another
all experience bearing on questions of
art and literature and many affecting us
as
individuals well it's uh at one such
meeting hunt brought along a book of
Engravings of the 15th century Fresco in
the Campo DeSanto at Pisa art that
predated Raphael here they saw no
pyramid structure no idealized subjects
but an attempt by an early Italian
artist to capture life as it was as hunt
said
it was probably the finding of this book
which caused the establishment of the
prite Brotherhood mle Rosetti and myself
were all seeking some sure ground some
new starting point for our new art here
at last was no trace of decline no
conventionality no
arrogance notice it's not pre Raphael
the word is actually pre
raphaelite so it means before the
raphaelites or the followers of Raphael
now the idea here is that Raphael
himself was a great artist great artist
of the hyene sance just after the year
1500 but that his style had got
conventionalized um made into a formula
by his students and the next Generations
after that those are the raphaelites the
followers the imitators and that's what
the uh the prite Brotherhood is
completely
rejecting M's Christ in the house with
his parents marked his attempt to
portray a lifelike scene rather than an
idealized one with crisp detail and a
composition that brushed away Academy
rules it came as a complete shock to an
unsuspecting
public this painting was revolutionary
on a number of levels firstly when it
appeared in public it appeared
completely audacious because of the way
it was composed it was SE to break all
the rules of composing you know great
paintings but coupled with that you have
this sort of audacious realism this what
was really I'm
shocking and the idea is he's playing
fast and loose with um sacred um imagery
and in doing so he's really sticking his
fingers up at the established way to
present religious
painting mle's audacity is clear when
his work is compared to that of of one
of his contemporaries Jr Herbert's
picture of the same subject follows the
Royal Academy's expectations with two
simple groupings Joseph and Mary on the
right and an Angelic faed Jesus isolated
against the background on the
left milles by contrast was far less
sacaran
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Millie was painting Christ like a street
urchin and I think what was also acious
was the the attention to different body
parts of the um of the figures rather
than as in the Herbert painting you the
fa is being smooth idealized with no
wrinkles or blemishes here you have of
Joseph his sunburnt hands his veins
protruding his broken dirty toenails
figure of Christ too you can see how his
nails haven't been sort of
cut Mary veins in her hands the swollen
hands of St an as said be a woman of
that particular
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age the blood actually looks real and of
new
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SCH to get the you the Sheep making them
not vivid in the background he obtained
sheep heads from a butchers
so as this real attention on all those
areas you would normally edit out of a
painting the fact M has made a point of
making them quite so you know clear and
apparent to the viewer that was
considered to be really audacious and
shocking quite Blasphemous in a way how
dare you treat Jesus you know or Christ
like
that shocking too were a technical
aspects of M's
work the forensic detail of M's brush
Strokes on the on John the Baptist's
covering in which every hair is
separately shown was
unprecedented the public were unused to
this literal style they had grown up on
more painterly approaches typified by
artists such as Edward Lancia who
depicted fur such as that on this donkey
with a uniform area of smooth Brown
using a large
brush but the Press couldn't stomach
melee's almost photographic sense of
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detail the attempt to associate the holy
family with no conceivable emission of
misery of dirt and even disease is
disgusting such criticism was a novelty
for melee he was the youngest ever
student to enter the Royal Academy
school at the age of 11 and became their
star pupil his front to the institution
that had nurtured him was therefore all
the more
shocking wanting to know what all the
fuss was about Queen Victoria sent to
have the painting brought from the walls
of the ra I hope it will not have any
bad effect on her mind melee
joked 22-year-old William Holman hunt
had entered the academy after hard graft
from a trade background he had faced
parental opposition to his decision to
be an artist but in the same year as
melee's Carpenters shop he exhibited an
equally radical painting of early Roman
missionaries converting a British family
to Christianity critics were equally
damning what had Mr Hunt eaten for his
supper and these in congruities came
into his head the British grapes have
had their effect on both the
missionaries who seem to have suffered
quite as much from this mistaken
Hospitality as from The Druids we hope
they had something better than British
Bry to counteract the effect we have
lingered too long over this frantic
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trash hunt instead of using the
Traditional Academy space which involves
having a sort of pyramid of a people
with the most important person at in the
middle sort of set slightly back into
the canvas he brings everything a Long
Way Forward uh like a Roman piece of
relief sculpture which makes the
painting modern in that you get this
incredible intimacy you feel incredibly
part of the scene a particularly
compelling figure is this young lad here
who's listening at the ground for the
approach of of footsteps who looks
straight out of us and we really feel
like we're on a level with him at the
same time he uses the the trick of 15th
century paintings of dividing space up
and having little apertures with
secondary scenes in them to make the
contrast between the the mob and family
and to suggest perhaps another stage in
this in this missionary's life to
suggest the danger that he might be
in this is one of my favorite passages
in a painting by hunt where the water
dribbles down and stains the Earth and
captures the light at the end you'll
notice that the water stains the red
Earth so it begins to take the
appearance of spil blood so we get a
suggestion that this missionary will
also die he'll also become a
martyr and most interesting here we have
the first ever appearance in a paraf
light painting of one of their most
famous models Lizzy Sidle who would
eventually appear in many of their
paintings Elizabeth Ellena Sidle was the
daughter of a Cutler who had been born
in Sheffield she was the second eldest
in a large family and The Story Goes
that Lizzie was working as a millona
when she was spotted by Walter deil who
was a close buddy of the prbs
I think Lizzie was taken up so enthusi
because she was enthusiastic about about
modeling and posing for them and being
with them uh she obviously entered into
the life of the studios very
eagerly the third founding member of the
prite Brotherhood Dante Gabriel Rosetti
was the son of a political Refugee from
Italy a poet as well as a painter the
Bohemian Rosetti dropped out of the
Royal Academy school choosing instead to
study with working painters in 1850 he
exhibited e Anila domini otherwise known
as the
enunciation one of the prb principles
was not just truth to nature but to
imagine how scenes from the past might
actually have been like to kind of imbue
them with a lifelike quality and so
Rosetti is thinking what could the
enunciation really have been like the
Virgin would not have been in a
neoclassical arcade as she's often
depicted in Italian
art so rosette is imagining what it was
like in
Nazareth so he's drawn her wearing a
very simple shift rather than any
elaborate
costume what's most striking about the
painting is the for
shortening so the The Spectator tumbles
right into the picture space there's no
foreground distancing the viewer from
the scene depicted Mary's face comes
forward to meet us in this very unusual
and alarming
way and it sort of abandons really the
true rules of perspective that artists
normally followed this dramatic
foreshortening and that's way before the
posst impressionist challenge to
perspective and framing
in addition to that the Archangel
Gabriel is not a winged creature in the
traditional manner but a very corporeal
young man who's actually naked
underneath his kind of
gown the only way he's depicted as an
angel is that he's flying on Flames
under his feet and one hand is allaying
Mary's fear and the other is thrusting
the Lily stem
right at her womb and that's the moment
of
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conception and of course roset didn't
escape the attention of the press either
the face of the Angel is insipidity
itself as shocking as the art itself was
the audacity of these painters forming a
coherent self styled movement the first
instance of artists with a Manifesto in
British art was met with
horror their ambition is an unhealthy
thirst which seeks notoriety by way the
eyes which continues to rage with
unabated absurdity among a class of
juvenile artists who style themselves
the
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pp as Holman hunt remarked the storm of
abuse was now turned into a hurricane we
hold them to be utterly heretical Dam as
an idiot counts The Strokes of a
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clock the brothers suddenly found
themselves at the center of a national
debate but at the same time they knew
that outrage often provides the pathway
to fame and with this in mind they moved
on from their initial religious subjects
to explore scenes of Modern
Life we often think of the French
Impressionists and Painters of that
generation as being the ones who were
the first to produce compelling scenes
of Modern Life Life in the modern city
the Modern urban world and a very famous
point of reference is charl bod's essay
published in 1863 the painter of Modern
Life where he describes a a painter who
goes into the streets of the modern city
and very rapidly captures the bustle the
excitement the flurry of of Modern urban
life now what's interesting is that the
prulite Brotherhood were interested in
exploring Modern urban life a full
decade before
that at the heart of this was their
fascination with the role of women in
society this was sometimes dressed up in
historical gu as in M's 1851 painting
Mariana where he explores women's
dependence on marriage the scene is
drawn from a poem by
Tennyson the Tennyson poems relate back
to Shakespeare's play measure for
measure um which describes this
character Mariana um whose DIY has been
lost at sea and as a result she's been
abandoned by a fiance Angelo and she's
sort of stranded in this moed gra and
somehow lamenting her present day
existence it's an image really of
lassitude on WE and boredom and
frustration and she's at her table
working on this embroidery and she's put
a pin down almost in a gesture of
frustration and she's presented in this
extraordinary pose with herself in her
hands on her back as if she's got back
ache and that cor relates to not only
the task she's been doing but also it's
an expression of her frustration and how
you know um you the agony she feels on
within she's obiously desperate for a
relationship for fulfillment of through
marriage and it's is being denied to
her she's been compelled towards a
nun-like existence on the other hand she
desires sexual fulfillment and her gaze
is looking rather abstractly at the
figure of the angel Gabriel on the
stained glass window um Gabriel should
really be looking at the figure of the
Virgin Mary was actually looking a
scance at
Mariana and there are accounts of women
in particular crowding around this
picture and really sort of empathizing
with the figure of Mariana and her
plight there were know more women there
were men at this this particular time so
he's in sense is addressing a particular
social issue from through the subject
from the past
but Holman hunt Bolder than melee felt
no need to dress his subject up in
medieval costume he painted in the here
and now when in 1853 he looked at the
role of the kept woman in the Awakening
conscience prostitution was a big issue
for debate at this time in Victorian
London especially amongst the middle
classes who were concerned about its
visibility in the city and prostitutes
also peer as marginal figures in novels
and in illustrations but what is very
different about the Awakening conscience
is that hunt brings the prostitute
Center Stage it's not a caricature of
the prostitute it's actually a portrait
which looks into the psychology of her
situation so what we see is the young
girl at the center of the painting
together with her
protector Hunt's characteristically set
up a very complex composition here so
that we actually see the window to the
Garden as it's reflected in a mirror on
the back wall so in a sense he's giving
us the whole view of the room from the
back wall with the mirror on it through
to the view to the Garden Hunt is
looking with Fierce intensity at every
detail of the modern scene he's
recording it all it's like a historic
documentation of a particular moment in
time and he's in a sense freezing that
all in the picture for
us it's a relationship which is based on
beautiful things on the apparent
protectiveness of the
man but we see at the bottom of the
painting uh a glove a discarded glove
which I think is meant to imply that she
will be discarded once he's finished
with
her she has just jumped out of his lap
she has just understood that the life
she's living is not the one she wants
she's understood the falseness of
it and we can see that under the table
there is a cat imitating the pose of the
man with his pore out um and a Birds
trying to escape trying to fly out of
the window and so we're left in some
uncertainty as to whether she will
escape
prostitutes were understood to have a
very set future which involved um a slow
degradation and very often suicide and I
think that's linked to the fact that the
model was not just a paid model but
somebody whose life hunt was very
interested
in the model was Annie Miller a working
girl who hunt found in a pub they
started an affair and Hunt set Annie up
in a boarding house and paid for her
education he intended to marry her
although he never kept his promise The
Awakening conscience mirrored the
relationships the prer rites were
developing with their
sitters they were becoming increasingly
attracted to work in class women as both
models and Mistresses as such a kind of
praly Sisterhood formed with them
appearing in many of the
paintings Elizabeth siddle now Rosetti's
mistress was joined by Annie
Miller and then Fanny cornforth who sat
for Rosetti's painting found
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she's generally identified as a
prostitute but she's probably better
described as a Goodtime girl she was
willing to go with any man who she
fancied to supper rooms and and dance
halls and she was certainly unescorted
when Rosetti met her in the tside
pleasure Gardens uh and accidentally
dislodged her Bonnet and loosening a
whole wealth of corn colored hair she
was a true stunner and at one Rosetti
took Fanny to his Studio positioned her
head against the wall and Drew the
careful study that forms the basis for
the
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painting in found Rosetti paints The
Prostitute at her most desperate State
when the end of the road is near it
shows the fate of a former country girl
laid Low by Urban
Vice it's Dawn in London a countryman
has come up to town to bring his calf
for Market
he spots his former sweetheart who
recoils in
shame to underline this the symbolic
nature of the encounter the poor little
calf which is on the way to slaughter is
held under a net which is symbolic of
the net that sin and shame have trapped
the young woman
in the chief focus of the painting is
the intertwined hands which the dro
Carter is grasping the woman by her
wrists and she's pulling away trying to
wriggle out from his
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grasp Rosetti would continue to work on
found over many years but eventually set
it aside
unfinished within just a few years of
the prite brotherhood's foundation in
1848 they had achieved their aim of
reforming British
art they had brought a new realism to
the
table they had upturned the rules of
composition they introduced new painting
techniques and new subject
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matters but they were still critically
damned and they faced a bleak future
their work didn't sell and they were
short of money
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but then an unexpected savior came along
John Ruskin the author of modern
painters was a Critic of almost
unprecedented power in the art world and
at the Vanguard of cultural
thinking he had kept quiet for 2 years
reading the abuse the prer ralyes had
suffered in the Press but then he
decided to put pen to paper in a letter
to the times to support the young
Rebels these pre-raphaelites will draw
either what they see or what they
suppose might have been the actual facts
of the scene they desire to represent
irrespective of any conventional rules
of picture
making when ruskin's letter appeared in
the
times it was as if the the gods had come
down from their Olympian Heights and
bestowed benefaction on the pral light
suddenly they could do no wrong
everyone knew that this man was quite
extraordinary everyone trusted his eye
in his judgment because his ideas were
so fresh exciting and they really struck
a cord with the Victorian public so a
word from John Ruskin was enough to make
or break an
artist they may as they gain experience
lay in our England the foundations of a
School of Art nobler than the world has
seen for 300 years
this marked a turning point in the prer
raites
fortunes now with ruskin's backing the
abuse in the Press fell away they could
continue with their revolutionary
Ambitions safe in the knowledge their
future careers were
secure despite all the hardships the
prite Brotherhood had finally won the
battle British art would never be the
same again
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