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[DavidRoss]

It features what is actually a very striking and naturalistic pose, beautifully painted and framed. But then it couples it with slightly mawkish Pugin-influenced kitsch which at the moment I cannot allow myself to warm to the aesthetic (I've seen too many church interiors mangled in this style).

Please to explain the 'kitsch," if it please you to do so, kind Mistress.   

[Elgarian]

One example of my problem is in the following painting:



It features what is actually a very striking and naturalistic pose, beautifully painted and framed. But then it couples it with slightly mawkish Pugin-influenced kitsch which at the moment I cannot allow myself to warm to the aesthetic (I've seen too many church interiors mangled in this style).

I think you might be more forgiving if confronted by the original, which is so exquisitely coloured as to appear like a source of light, or as if it were painted with coloured jewels. (But maybe you've seen it?) They can't escape their age, of course; I can't remember offhand just where Millais painted that particular interior, but it will have been a real interior - just the sort of thing you don't like, rendered with extreme faithfulness to make it even worse for you! Horrors! And Ruskin, their great champion, wasn't happy with what he saw as their 'tractarian tendencies', though much of that arose I think as a by-product of their admiration for early Christian painting.

Some of their loveliest things were designed for book illustrations, which you might find you can enjoy more easily. I'll see if I can find some good ones, tomorrow.

[Lethevich]

Elgarian - well-played, and thank you. I feel that you could convince anyone of anything with such a fine style of writing! Hopefully I will be more in the mood to properly appreciate the pre-raps this time round. I am kicking myself that my distaste for them in the past allowed me to pass up buying an almost A2 sized colour artbook dedicated to them for a pittance (£5 or something ridiculously low). Second hand finds like that don't present themselves very often

[Elgarian]

Hopefully I will be more in the mood to properly appreciate the pre-raps this time round.

One of the things I always say about the PreRaphs is that their story is often more interesting than their pictures ... which isn't quite fair, but there's more than a smidgeon of truth in it. I've just been foraging through the two-volume Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (written by his son) in the hope of discovering the actual location of the picture you love to hate. Well, I didn't quite find that, but I did find these snippets:

"The window in the background of Mariana was taken from one in Merton Chapel, Oxford. The ceiling of the chapel was being painted, and scaffolding was of course put up, and this Millais made use of while working. The scene outside was painted in the Combes' garden, just outside their windows."

The Coombs were very early PreRaphaelite patrons. Where the room itself was doesn't seem to be recorded. However, you'll sympathise with Ruskin's comments in the letter he wrote to The Times. He was, he said, glad to see that the "lady in blue is heartily tired of painted windows and idolatrous toilet-table". And then, had Millais "painted Mariana at work in an unmoated grange, instead of idle in a moated one, it had been more to the purpose, whether of art or life".

If you do find yourself drawn in by reading Hilton's book, may I make a recommendation? The best, most captivating book ever written about the Pre-Rs was written by William Gaunt, and has been published under two titles: originally The PreRaphaelite Tragedy; then subsequently as The Pre-Raphaelite Dream; and then finally as Tragedy again. Gaunt was a wonderful scholar and a dazzlingly good writer, and he writes this like a novel, yet it's meticulously accurate. The first few lines shows what you're in for:

"This is the true story of Knights of Art, born out of their time, who went a-roaming through the spacious but prosaic reign of Queen Victoria, like so many Don Quixotes, their heads as full of medieval chivalry, of strange questing and of high endeavour. They tilted not at windmills but at factories; they fought against dragons which were not the lizards of fable but railway trains, the steel-clad, steam-snorting dragons of the industrial age. ... It is the story of baffled idealists in a material age, seeking something they could scarcely define - a past, a future or both in one - certainly anything except the present in which they lived. It might be a religious revelation, the discovery of a happiness whose secret was lost to the earth though it had existed once, the outline of a new order not yet formed. It was all these things, in some confused degree, which set each one journeying, after his own fashion, to Palestine, to Iceland, or into the territory of the imagination as if in the old legendary pursuit of the Holy Grail."

That might be a complete turn-off for you. But if it isn't, it's an easy book to find. There are lots of cheap copies on Amazon; if you just search for 'Gaunt Preraphaelite' you'll get them all coming up.

And now, finally (if you're still awake), here are a couple of wood-engraved book illustrations by that gentlest of Pre-Raphaelites Arthur Hughes, who tends to be overshadowed by the Big Three. The first is from George MacDonald's children's fairy tale At The Back of the North Wind; and the other, Two lovers by a sundial, is from a magazine called Good Words, printed 1870-ish. He has a trick of hovering very close to the brink of sentimentality, but just holding back - so there's a sort of lip-quivering poignancy about much of what he does.

[Lethevich]

Sounds just the ticket. because I am not used to such florid prose, it will be a refreshing change whether I enjoy it or not. I just ordered the cheapest copy of the newest print-run I could find,* thanks

*I love Amazon for including information such as date of printing and binding - old hardbacks are "nice", but when they fall apart in your hands they swiftly lose their appeal...

[Elgarian]

Sounds just the ticket. because I am not used to such florid prose, it will be a refreshing change whether I enjoy it or not. I just ordered the cheapest copy of the newest print-run I could find,* thanks

*I love Amazon for including information such as date of printing and binding - old hardbacks are "nice", but when they fall apart in your hands they swiftly lose their appeal...

I betcha five million pounds you'll like it. There's no better way to go tramping through the Victorian art world. After I first read it (and I've reread it many times since) those guys became my friends for life, with all their absurdities and brilliances and quirks and foibles. So now, when I see one of their pictures in a gallery, it doesn't feel remote and museumified; it feels more like getting a phone call from an old chum.

[Dr. Dread]

Jeff Strand's PRESSURE. If you like what I like, read it.

[karlhenning]

An article about custody.

Jackson left behind three children: Michael Joseph Jackson Jr., known as Prince Michael, 12; Paris Michael Katherine Jackson, 11; and Prince Michael II, 7. The youngest son was born to a surrogate mother.

For someone of 'artistic genius', he didn't have all that much imagination naming his children (a daughter with Michael among her names?)

[Dr. Dread]

[karlhenning]

An older item from The Onion:

Michael Jackson Deposed As King of Pop in Hitless Coup

[DavidRoss]

An article about custody.

For someone of 'artistic genius', he didn't have all that much imagination naming his children (a daughter with Michael among her names?)

One of the most beautiful women I've ever known was named Michael.  Like Sydney, it was an upper-class rarity, but the latter is growing more common these days whereas the former still seems rare.  In Mr. Jackson's case, naming all his adopted children "Michael" seems a likely symptom of something else.

That poor fellow (Mr. Jackson) -- in many ways a tragic figure for our age.  On the face of it, his thing for children (whatever it was) may have been a pathology induced by his own stolen childhood. 

Re. Lethe & Elgarian's discussion about Pre-Raphaelite painters:  When I was a very young man, still enthralled by my childhood indoctrination into the 20th Century cults of "Modernism" and "Progress," when I saw reproduced images of Pre-Raphaelite works I hastily dismissed them as sentimental schlock:  illustration, not Art.  That changed after my first visit to the Tate Gallery.

I'm not sure if Wm. Morris & friends were hip to the implications of the class system underpinning the world of beauty and grace they preferred to the machine age bearing down on them.  I suspect that most of those groveling for a living in Dickens's England would trade their lives in a heartbeat for the life of a typical English working-class fellow today.  And yet I cannot help but imagine what sort of world we might have had the benefits of that Victorian explosion of science and industry been applied without the attendant population explosion and with the guidance of the values celebrated by the Arts & Crafts movement.  Present figures suggest that ~3 billion people worldwide live in poverty today.  That's more than twice the total global population at the time Millais painted Mariana. 

(Incidentally, in researching the date of the painting -- 1850-51 -- I came upon this brief but enlightening essay about its provenance and reception and this more detailed critical evaluation.)

Thank you, Elgarian, for bringing Gaunt's book to our attention.  I've ordered a copy and look forward to reading it.

[karlhenning]

One of the most beautiful women I've ever known was named Michael.

And, of course, the French Michelle and the Italian Micaela are feminized forms of the name.

[Elgarian]

When I was a very young man, still enthralled by my childhood indoctrination into the 20th Century cults of "Modernism" and "Progress," when I saw reproduced images of Pre-Raphaelite works I hastily dismissed them as sentimental schlock:  illustration, not Art.  That changed after my first visit to the Tate Gallery.

One still occasionally finds that 'illustration, not art' accusation levelled at them today. Trouble is, if one dumped in the cellars of the world all the paintings, drawings and prints that are 'illustrations' we wouldn't have all that much left to look at.

(Incidentally, in researching the date of the painting -- 1850-51 -- I came upon this brief but enlightening essay about its provenance and reception and this more detailed critical evaluation.)

This is good stuff, and demonstrates the inadequacy of the description of the PreRs as 'realist' painters; rather, they were symbolic realist painters - very different animals (although I don't think Rossetti ever qualified as being any kind of 'realist', being much closer to the Blake  end of the spectrum). That's why Ruskin was so drawn to them - brought up on Natural Theology and Biblical typology, he could 'read' their pictures extraordinarily well, and his writings on them are very enlightening. Incidentally, even though I've boggled at it a lot of times over the years, Hunt's Scapegoat still qualifies as one of the most extraordinary paintings I've ever seen in terms of sheer unignorable unforgettable presence. Love it or hate it (or both), that goat bleats at you across the gallery and demands attention to its surreal miserableness.

I've ordered a copy and look forward to reading it.

It's a sure-fire hit, I promise. I won't bet money on it this time though, just in case Lethe doesn't like it and I have to cough up five million pounds.

[Franco]

I am finding this discussion on the Pre-Raphaelite group interesting and I also find it related to a chapter on Longfellow in the Columbia History of American Poetry.  The author complains that Longfellow was a victim of Modernism, the critical school which decided that the only poetry and poets worth studying were those requiring critical exegesis, hence the narrative poets of the 19th Century were ignored, or deemed unworthy, because their verse could be understood without needing any gloss, and the only poets from the 19th Century they chose to write about were the ones they decided could provide the precedent path to Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickenson and about half of Edgar Allen Poe.

[Lethevich]

It's a sure-fire hit, I promise. I won't bet money on it this time though, just in case Lethe doesn't like it and I have to cough up five million pounds.

0:) In-related news, getting into the Thames & Hudson book has been fun so far - the writer's prose is very readable. It has helped me seperate the individual styles of the artists more effectively. Prior to this, I was still somewhat confused at what works like Madox Brown's Work could possibly have to do with Rossetti's fish-lipped maidens. Realising this has prompted me to look further into individual painters, and it seems that the further a painter gets from Rossetti's ideals, the more I like them. An example is Waterhouse, who I find to take the best from the Pre-Raphs, but sometimes fuses it with just what they were reacting to - rather traditionally proportioned scenes. Perhaps this is why he appears to have had more "hits" than any of the others. At least six of his paintings are probably on "collective consciousness" level of exposure - at least in British society.

I wonder whether my Rossetti problem can ever be cured - as it manifests itself in artists more influenced by him than others, Sandys in particular. Where I can see value in the Millais Mariana painting, and perhaps work my way past what I saw as kitsch, I am not sure whether I could ever bend myself to finding this to be enjoyable art:



But ho-hum, I'll try

[Elgarian]

I wonder whether my Rossetti problem can ever be cured - as it manifests itself in artists more influenced by him than others, Sandys in particular. Where I can see value in the Millais Mariana painting, and perhaps work my way past what I saw as kitsch, I am not sure whether I could ever bend myself to finding this to be enjoyable art:

You're not the first to have this problem, not just with Rossetti but with some of the others too. Ruskin himself said of Ford Madox Brown: 'Pictures are pictures, and things that aren't, aren't'. And indeed, I find Madox Brown's paintings are very hard to 'like' - though his diaries are full of interest and his whole approach to his art is fascinating. Large numbers of Rossetti's later paintings were not much more than potboilers. To find him at his best, one needs to look at some of the watercolours done in the 1850s, and some of the pencil drawings he made of Elizabeth Siddal. These are among the finest works of their kind made in the nineteenth century, and their qualities are barely hinted at by the more famous pictures.

The watercolours have to be seen in the original - their jewel-like quality doesn't come over too well in reproduction: they're small, very cramped and intricate compositions often with a mystical flavour: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7b/Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti_005.jpg/585px-Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti_005.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f2/Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti_-_The_First_Madness_of_Ophelia.JPG/444px-Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti_-_The_First_Madness_of_Ophelia.JPG

Here's one of the exquisite drawings of Lizzie, done with such intuitive grace that the lyrical sweeps of the pencil lines produce a kind of visual equivalent of singing:

http://www.tate.org.uk/collection/N/N04/N04629_9.jpg

Frederick Sandys was not, I think a top-notch painter; his great strengths are seen in his wood engravings, which have a Durer-like intensity to them:

http://collection.aucklandartgallery.govt.nz/collection/images/display/1981-1990/1983_27_5.jpg

So the best work of the Pre-Rs doesn't always come easily; one has to dig around a bit. But the more one knows about them, the more interesting their pictures become.

[Lethevich]

Thank you so much! You are an invaluable guide

It looks like if the PR's best work is often found in the smaller gem-like pieces it will be neccessary to find a comprehensive artbook, perhaps one for each major artist, eventually. I doubt that a lot can be found online. Gives something fun to look forward to (and more to hunt for in second hand bookshops!).

[DavidRoss]

...it seems that the further a painter gets from Rossetti's ideals, the more I like them. An example is Waterhouse, who I find to take the best from the Pre-Raphs, but sometimes fuses it with just what they were reacting to - rather traditionally proportioned scenes. Perhaps this is why he appears to have had more "hits" than any of the others. At least six of his paintings are probably on "collective consciousness" level of exposure - at least in British society.

http://www.jwwaterhouse.com/
http://www.johnwilliamwaterhouse.com/articles/

[Florestan]

How about Rosetti's poetry? Is it any good?

Thread duty: Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle.

[Lethevich]

http://www.jwwaterhouse.com/
http://www.johnwilliamwaterhouse.com/articles/

Thanks for the links - it's interesting that lost or unknown Waterhouse works are still being located to this day