The Brotherhood
Peter Quennell
We have not had many schools, coteries or successfully organised 'movements' in the history of British art; and it is their record as the founders of such a school, -rather than their works as individual painters, that makes the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood still so fascinating a subject. The fraternity was first established, ap- propriately enough, in the year of Revolu- tions, 1848; and the founding brothers were three intensely ambitious youths, Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who then attracted four subsidiary members. The aim they shared was a comparatively simple, yet extremely bold one — to cleanse the Augean stables of Victorian academic art by rejecting the in- fluence of the wicked High Renaissance, following the lead of earlier, more guileless Italian artists, Fra Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli, and cultivating 'a childlike submis- sion to nature'.
They had no intention, however, of rebelling against academic realism itself, but believed that 'a man's work must be the reflex of a living image in his own mind, and not an icy double of the facts . . What they sought was realism under an altogether new guise, 'emotional but ex- tremely minute', which reflected their ecstatic vision of the world; and this they sought to convey through their use of a hard precise outline and an exquisite degree of 'finish'. Colours must always be bright and pure. In 1851, when John Ruskin, now their eloquent supporter, invited Hunt and Millais to accompany him to Switzerland, both refused and instead set up their easels on the banks of a pretty English brook, where Hunt painted his 'Hireling Shepherd' and Millais, the beautiful flowery background of his unforgettable 'Ophelia'. Each carried a palette of white porcelain, to ensure that the pigments into which they dipped their brushes remained entirely clean and fresh.
The Pre-Raphaelites were indeed a gen- uine brotherhood, united by close personal affection. So intimately allied were Hunt and Millais, and so effusive was their cor- respondence, that it has sometimes puzzled their biographers; and Professor Bell finds it necessary to observe that their relation- ship, like the relationship of Tennyson and his beloved friend Hallam, was no doubt completely innocent. Of the three, Millais was the most gifted and, physically, the most distinguished — his large eyes, we are told, shone with an 'angelic' light, and he had a splendid halo of 'bronze-coloured locks'; while Rossetti, during his younger days, before he had grown fat and sad, possessed a dark Italian charm, as, his long brown hair sweeping the shoulders of his ancient black suit, he wandered dreamily around the London streets.
Another agreeable feature of the trio was their unending boyish jollity and their ex- plosive bursts of humour. In 1857, after the Brotherhood had been joined by the equally enthusiastic and light-hearted Burne-Jones, they descended on Oxford to decorate a chamber of the brand-new Union Building. Their efforts were absurdly ill-managed their decorations soon faded; but 'What fun we had!', one of them recalled, 'What jokes! What roars of laughter!' Each of the brethren had an affectionate ,nickname; and the young women they admired and loved were often similarly styled. Rossetti's muse, for example, the romantic Elizabeth Siddal, having started her career as 'Lizzie' or 'The Sid' was later immortalised as `Guggums'.
It is difficult to feel dull in Pre- Raphaelite company; and Professor Bell
does the Brotherhood justice in his inform- ative and carefully detailed though, here and there, somewhat rambling and dis" jointed book. His title he takes from an essay by Ruskin, written at a time when 8 horde of savage critics, including Dickens and Kingsley, had recently set about 'The Carpenter's Shop', Millais' curious picture of the youthful Jesus. A viewer, Dickens warned his public, must be prepared t° plumb 'the lowest depths of what is meanrepulsive and revolting'; and in 1851 Ruskin!! generously fired off a magisterial counterblast. If the Pre-Raphaelites, he said, would 'adhere to their principles, and paint nature as it is around them, with the help of modern science, with the, earnestness of the men of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they will . . . found a new and noble school in England.' Having passed his youth among the Chief luminaries of the Bloomsburian intelligent- sia — art critics who talked of 'significant form' and were ready `to use just the same criteria in judging an illustration as • • • In judging a carpet or a teapot' — Professor Bell, when considering the achievements 0, the Brotherhood, has a nicely balance point of view. During the later 191,h- century, he admits, the French avant-garde `produced artists who belonged to an order of magnitude different from that of out English rebels'. Yet the Pre-Raphaelites, he, adds, despite their obsessive realism an passion for telling a strong moral story real art, they thought, was the servant 01 justice and truth — cannot now be thrust, aside, and are still remarkable and praiseworthy. There is no doubt, °n the other hand, that they occupied an artistic backwater. Rossetti and his circle desP1seu.,, the Impressionists — 'this incredible new. French school (Rossetti wrote to 11.15 brother) — people painted with two eyes one socket . . . Fantin [Latour] took Me t° see a man named Manet who has paint things of the same kind'. Indeed remarkable, as Professor Bell sub' gests, some Pre-Raphaelite ' masterpieces are. Whatever we may think of HolMan, Hunt's canvases — his lurid 'Scapegoat for example, painted regardless of brigall,ds and sandflies, on the hideous margin of the Dead Sea — Millais' and his 'Blind Girl' have an extraordinary fascina" tion. The 'emotional realism' they display Is almost alarmingly compulsive; and vie study the rushes and wild roses that overlook Ophelia's last hour — 'Gut' gums' is said to have been the model -- she drifts singing down the stream, or the, landscape that rises behind the blind 811.1, and the glossy rooks settled in the cornfield near by, with a sense of keen delight. Is this true painting, we ask ourselves, or a kind at painted literature, the pictorial equivalent of a Tennysonian poem? But perhaPs 1 does not signify. At least until he joined the Royal Academy and became an eminent Victorian, Millais unquestionably revealed a touch of genius — in short, had an eav; quisite visionary gift that still someh° heightens our own powers of seeing.
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