Transcription
[Music]
Keep your chin up and don't be afraid.
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At the end of the storm, when I was 14, the sure way to get a rise out of my parents' generation at dinner parties was to mention the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein. "Sentimental twaddle," they'd say. "Carousel? No chance! No hope!" If you mentioned Victorian architecture, there would be rage—pretty much apoplectic rage. But if you really wanted to cause an uproar, if you really wanted people to choke on their fondue sets, you mentioned the Pre-Raphaelites.
I became very excited about the whole Victorian movement. I loved these so-called unfashionable buildings. Of course, people like John Ruskin were beginning to crusade for them, and so I suppose I joined the crusade with a great and excited heart. That's when I discovered the Pre-Raphaelites. Who were these people who painted these extraordinary, doomed women? Who painted these pictures of their time with huge moral messages? Who were they?
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The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, or PRB for short, was founded in secret in 1848 and numbered just seven people. Of the original group, three are famous: John Everett Millais, the youngest ever entrant to the Royal Academy of Art; the Christian visionary William Holman Hunt; and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a man who soon developed a reputation for getting rather too entangled with the women he painted. All of them were around 20 years old, and they were determined to shake up Victorian London.
Now war is declared, and battle comes down. London calling to the underworld! Come out of the sea! I'm on my way to the house in Great Street where the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848. In fact, it was the house of Millais' parents. I think there was a little less traffic in those days.
To the imitation zone, forget it, brother; you can go in.
[Applause]
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Alone, the guys put a plaque on the door saying PRB. Some people, of course, thought it meant "Please ring the bell." Others, who were real insiders, knew that it was about Rossetti, i.e., penis.
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Better today, it's an office, but once upon a time, the back room was Millais' studio, filled with canvases, paintbrushes, and bric-a-brac. Here, the group studied engravings of works by artists of the past, especially those before the Renaissance, painters like Raphael. Hence the term "Pre-Raphaelite."
This is an edition of the Campo Santo engravings by Carlo Lino. It's a book that the Brotherhood poured over time and time again in their quest to find out what painting before Raphael was really like. Their aim was to take art out of the establishment and give it back to the people. This was a world away from high Renaissance paintings commissioned by wealthy noblemen and the church. What these engravings offered were pictures of real people—faces that the artists saw in the street, engaged in conversation.
And so the Pre-Raphaelites decided to do the same, using real people in dramatic situations to tell human stories that ordinary people could understand. Their paintings are unafraid to tackle the big themes: they are about love, death, history, myth, legend, religion, morality, and above all, they are about psychological drama—whether it's a proposal of marriage, a betrayal, or a death threat.
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This is Millais' painting "Lorenzo and Isabella," here in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. It's one of the very first pictures in which the monogram of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood first prominently appeared. You can see the letters PRB at the foot of Isabella's stool. The subject matter comes from a poem by Keats. Isabella is the daughter of a wealthy Florentine merchant. She wants to marry Lorenzo, the man sitting next to her, but he's only a lowly clerk in the family business, and her brothers have other ideas. Isabella will not be allowed to marry beneath her, so her brothers murder Lorenzo to prevent the couple from eloping. This is an honor killing.
Like the medieval painters before him, Millais used real people as his models—his sister-in-law, his father, and his friends. Even Rossetti gets a look in, draining a wine glass at the back. Frankly, you could say that Millais' composition is pretty ropey and the legs very awkward, but this early picture shows what the Brotherhood was about. The vivid colors result from their technique of overpainting a canvas that had been previously primed with white; it became their trademark.
This picture may look like a medieval painting, but it's designed to have contemporary meaning. This is more than a simple narrative painting; it is a protest against restrictive social expectations.
The year 1848 was a time of massive social change when the Industrial Revolution was in full throttle. Towns like Manchester, Liverpool, and London were overcrowded, unsanitary, and diseased. Infant mortality was high, and death was ever-present.
I'm here in sunny Cleveland Street, just north of Oxford Circus, where Holman Hunt's studio was. By the 1840s, apparently, it was even nastier than it is now—a real den of iniquity with prostitutes, cheap shots, and all the like. Don't think it's improved.
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Living and working in London, Rossetti, Hunt, and Millais saw the huge price that the lower classes were paying for this new industrialization. Those flocking to the cities in search of work were met with low-paid, unregulated jobs if they were lucky. More often than not, they were faced with unemployment. Many girls were forced into prostitution to survive—an occupation that fed the appetite of the wealthy. And by many, I mean many. In the last quarter of the 19th century, at least 880,000 prostitutes worked in central London alone.
In the late 1840s, the victims of industrialization called for change. Inspired by the revolutionary workers around them, Millais, Hunt, and Rossetti, together with their Pre-Raphaelite brothers, decided that it was time for their own revolution in art.
In 1853, Holman Hunt began to paint pictures about contemporary issues, not least the surge in prostitution, which he saw as a direct consequence of the Industrial Revolution. The result was this painting, "The Awakening Conscience." The painting depicts a kept mistress and her lover in a salubrious villa in St. John's Wood. In the 19th century, this was an ideal location for a man to keep his mistress—close to home in Belgravia but conveniently hidden away in Hyde Park.
The woman has rings on every finger of her left hand except for the wedding finger. She is also in what at the time would have been called a state of undress. Her loose hair indicates her intimacy with the man. The discarded, soiled glove in the foreground represents her realization that she could be abandoned by her lover at any time and fall into common prostitution. The model for the painting was a barmaid, Annie Miller, whom Holman Hunt was attempting to educate and then marry.
Annie is shown jumping up as if she has just heard a knock on the door or has realized that her life has to change. Holman Hunt originally intended the painting to be seen side by side with another of his works—a painting that was to become one of the most famous Pre-Raphaelite images of all time, "The Light of the World." Hunt depicts a passage from the Bible: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come into him and will sup with him, and he with me."
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Annie Miller, here as a kept woman, is therefore responding to Christ knocking on the door. The deeper meaning of the paintings only becomes clear when they are seen together. Now we can see why this picture was intended to be painted with "The Awakening Conscience." You see, it's about anyone can be saved; anyone can hear the knock on the door. In the 19th century, even Jesus was a Pre-Raphaelite.
In the summer of 1851, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt traveled to the countryside and began painting outdoors. They painted every day except for Sunday, usually from 8:00 in the morning until 7:00 in the evening—11 hours a day, 6 days a week, for 23 weeks. The idea was to rediscover the natural world that was threatened by the Industrial Revolution.
This is Holman Hunt's famous painting "The Hireling Shepherd," in the Manchester Art Gallery, where there is the most superb collection of Pre-Raphaelite works, wonderfully shown. I recommend everybody to go to it. The story here, of course, is that the shepherd is neglecting his flock, showing something called a death's-head moth.