What was it?
PRB, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood The mysterious initials first appeared
following Rossetti's signature
on his Girlhood of Mary Virgin exhibited in 1849.
They were the outcome of talks between Hunt and Millais in 1848, although
the choice of the expression 'Pre-Raphaelite' was largely fortuitous. It had
already been said of the Nazarener that they sought to emulate the painters
earlier than Raphael, and this was more or less the idea of the original
Brotherhood (Hunt, Millais, Rossetti and his brother William, Collinson, Woolner
the sculptor, and Stephens) - they knew very little about Italian painting earlier
than Raphael, but they did know that they thought Raphael himself
over-praised
and they did not like Bolognese and Roman 17th-century painting, which
they thought insincere. From the first the movement was very literary (a
periodical called The Germ ran for four numbers) and the painters insisted on
the importance of a serious subject and on a highly elaborated symbolism and
freshly thought-out iconography. The technical means, such as bright colour,
extreme detail, study of outdoor motives on the spot, and the famous method
of working into a wet white ground - all these were no more than means,
although they had great influence on later painters who had no connection
with the movement, such as Ford Madox Brown. In 1850 Rossetti revealed
the meaning of the initials and at once a great storm broke; the principal
accusations being that they set themselves up as better than Raphael,
that they
were secret Romanists (i.e. linked with the Oxford Movement), and that they
were blasphemers. This last point was made - in an exceptionally savage and
unperceptive attack - by Dickens, the victim being Millais's Christ in the House
of His Parents, better known as The Carpenter's Shop (RA 1850: London, Tate).
He described the picture as showing 'the interior of a carpenter's shop. In the
foreground ... is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering red-headed boy in a
bed-gown, who appears to have received a poke in the hand . . . playing in an
adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling
woman, so horrible in her ugliness that (supposing it were possible for any
human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would
stand out... as a Monster in the vilest cabaret in France or the lowest gin-shop
in England.' After further attacks in 1851, Ruskin came to their defence,
commending them for copying nature, not the Quattrocento, and saying that
they were 'laying in our England the foundations of a school of art nobler than
the world has seen for three hundred years'. Such was Ruskin's
reputation that
their success was assured: Millais's Ophelia (1851-2: Tate) in the next Academy
exhibition was a great success, but shortly after this the group, which had never
had any avowed theoretical basis, dissolved: Millais to become the typical
successful RA and PR A, Rossetti to found a sort of second Brotherhood at
Oxford with Morris and Burne-Jones,
and Hunt alone, working in Palestine
on religious pictures, to maintain the original ideas. Collinson
soon drifted
away, leaving as his best memorial The Empty Purse (1857: Tate, also called For
Sale), Woolner emigrated to Australia, providing the inspiration for Brown's
The Last of England, and various other artists Hughes (April Love) and
Martineau (The Last Day in the Old Home - a tract on the evils of drink and
gambling) - adopted their ideas for the production of anecdotal-cum-genre
pictures. From the mid-1850s they were well supported by the new middle-class
patrons who appreciated their every-picture-tells-a-story type of art, and their
attention to detail,- which fitted in with the Victorian keenness on visible
value-for-money.
There are good collections of their works in Birmingham,
Manchester, Oxford and London (Tate).
Source: The Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists (Penguin Reference Books)
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