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The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
brought notoriety to British
art in the 19th century.

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Bursting into the spotlight
mid-century,

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they shocked their peers
with a new kind of radical art.

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This programme explores
the origins of the Brotherhood,
their initial achievements

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and the centuries of dogma
their paintings overturned.

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For many, the idea of Pre-Raphaelite
art is informed by images

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of luscious, long-haired women

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or of sentimental,
chocolate-box children.

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But the Brotherhood's early work
was very different from these
later works associated with them.

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Their first paintings
controversially applied a bold
new realism to sacred subjects.

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And then, a decade before
the French Impressionists,

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their brushes captured insalubrious
subjects from urban life.

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Such was the outrage
that their work caused,

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one eminent Victorian dedicated
the front page of his magazine
to the venting of his disgust.

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You behold the interior
of a carpenter's shop.

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In the foreground of that carpenter's
shop is a hideous, wry-necked,
blubbering, red-headed boy,

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in a bed-gown, who appears to have
received a poke in the hand from
the stick of another boy with whom

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he has been playing in
an adjacent gutter,

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and to be holding it up for the
contemplation of a kneeling woman,

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so horrible in her ugliness,
that she would stand out from

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the rest of the company as a monster
in the vilest cabaret in France,

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or the lowest gin shop in England.

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Wherever it is possible to express
ugliness of feature, limb,
or attitude, you have it expressed.

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The year was 1850, the critic was
the darling of the nation, Charles
Dickens, and the painter in question

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was the 21-year-old
Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais.

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His picture, Christ In The
House Of His Parents,

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showed Christ
in his father's workshop.

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It was painted to provoke,
and it had not failed.

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They were all very young,
still only about 20.

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And they wanted to make their mark,
they wanted it all,

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fame, riches, girls,
whatever they could get.

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And what they wanted was revolution.

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The Brotherhood was founded in 1848,

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when revolution of a different
kind was spreading across Europe,

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and Karl Marx published
his Communist Manifesto.

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Fired by the political turmoil
around them,

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John Everett Millais,
and two fellow students at
the Royal Academy School,

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William Holman Hunt, then aged 21...

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..and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 20,
decided to overturn British art.

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They all had a similar aim.
They were all rather dissatisfied

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with the teaching they were
receiving at the Academy.

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They wanted to
work as part of a group
and get inspiration from their peers.

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They all agreed that during
the early 19th century,

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British art had become lazy,
predictable and boring,

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so they sympathised with
the art scholar John Ruskin
when he complained of...

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The eternal brown cows in ditches
and white sails in squalls

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and sliced lemons in saucers
and foolish faces in simpers.

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It's important to remember that the
Pre-Raphaelite group was interested

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in literature and poetry as much
as visual art from the very start.

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So, in a move to restore meaning
to art, they decided to paint moral,

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significant subjects drawn
from literature and the Bible.

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And they reversed the sterile
academic tradition they had all
been encouraged to emulate

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at the Royal Academy, of form,
colour and composition

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as embodied in the work
of the 16th century artist Raphael.

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But as Hunt complained...

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Why should the composition
be always apexed in pyramids?

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Why should the highest light
always be on the principal figure?

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Why make one corner of the picture
always in the shade?

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Millais, Hunt and Rossetti
set up a group

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that would offer an alternative
to this Academy dogma,

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and recruited four other
like-minded thinkers,

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including Rossetti's brother
William, who wrote...

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We were really like brothers,
continually together and confiding

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to one another all experience bearing
on questions of art and literature

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and many affecting us as individuals.

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At one such meeting, Hunt brought
along a book of engravings

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of the 15th-century frescoes
in the Campo de Santo at Pisa.

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Art that pre-dated Raphael.

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Here they saw no pyramid structure,
no idealised subjects.

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But an attempt by an early Italian
artist to capture life as it was.

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As Hunt said...

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It was probably the finding of this
book which caused the establishment
of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

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Millais, Rossetti and myself were
all seeking some sure ground, some
new starting point for our new art.

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Here at last was no trace of
decline, no conventionality,
no arrogance.

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Notice it's not Pre-Raphael.

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The word is actually Pre-Raphaelite,

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so it means before the Raphaelites,
who were the followers of Raphael.

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Now the idea here is that Raphael
himself was a great artist,

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a great artist of the
High Renaissance, just after 1500,

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but that his style
had got conventionalised,

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made into a formula by his students

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and the next generations after that.

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Those are the Raphaelites,
the followers, the imitators.

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And that's what the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood is completely rejecting.

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Millais's Christ In The House With
His Parents marked his attempt

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to portray a lifelike scene
rather than an idealised one.

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With crisp detail and a composition
that brushed away Academy rules,

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it came as a complete shock
to an unsuspecting public.

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This painting was revolutionary
on a number of levels.

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Firstly, when it appeared in public
it appeared completely audacious

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because of the way it was composed.

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It was seen to break all the rules
of composing great paintings.

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But coupled with that, you have
this sort of audacious realism,

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which is what's really shocking.

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And the idea is he's playing
fast and loose with sacred imagery

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and in doing so he's really sticking
his fingers up at the established way
to present religious painting.

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Millais' audacity is clear,
when his work is compared to that
of one of his contemporaries.

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J R Herbert's picture
of the same subject

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follows the Royal Academy's
expectations

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with two simple groupings,

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Joseph and Mary on the right,

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and an angelic-faced Jesus isolated
against the background on the left.

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Millais', by contrast,
was far less saccharine.

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Millais was painting
Christ as a street urchin.

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And what's also audacious
is the attention to body parts
of the figures, rather than,

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as in the Herbert painting,
the faces being smooth,

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idealised with no wrinkles
or blemishes,

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here you have Joseph
with his sunburned hands,
his veins protruding.

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His broken dirty toenails.

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The figure of Christ, too. You can
see how his nails haven't been cut.

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Mary, the veins in her hands,
the swollen hands of St Anne

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as they would be in a woman
of that particular age.

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The blood actually looks real
and visceral.

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To get the sheep, making them
look vivid in the background,

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he obtained sheep heads
from a butcher's.

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So there was this real attention
on all those areas you would
normally edit out of a painting.

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The fact Millais has made a point
of making them quite clear
and apparent to the viewer,

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that was considered to be
really audacious and shocking,
quite blasphemous in a way.

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How dare you treat Jesus
or Christ like that?

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Shocking too were the technical
aspects of Millais' work.

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The forensic detail of Millais'
brushstrokes on the fur on
John the Baptist's covering,

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in which every hair is separately
shown, was unprecedented.

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The public were unused
to this literal style.

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They had grown up on more painterly
approaches typified by artists

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such as Edwin Landseer who depicted
fur, such as that on this donkey,

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with a uniform area of smooth
brown using a large brush.

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But the press couldn't
stomach Millais' almost
photographic sense of detail.

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The attempt to associate the Holy
Family with no conceivable omission

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of misery, of dirt and
even disease, is disgusting.

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Such criticism was
a novelty for Millais.

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He was the youngest ever student
to enter the Royal Academy School,

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at the age of 11,
and became their star pupil.

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His affront to the institution that
had nurtured him was therefore
all the more shocking.

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Wanting to know what all the fuss
was about, Queen Victoria sent

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"to have the painting brought
from the walls of the RA."

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"I hope it will not have any bad
effect on her mind," Millais joked.

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22-year-old William Holman Hunt
had entered the Academy
after hard graft.

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From a trade background,
he had faced parental opposition
to his decision to be an artist.

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But in the same year as Millais'
Carpenter's Shop,

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he exhibited
an equally radical painting

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of early Roman missionaries

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converting a British family
to Christianity.

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But the critics
were equally damning.

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What had Mr Hunt eaten for
his supper when these incongruities
came into his head?

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The British grapes have had their
effect on both the missionaries,

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who seem to have suffered
quite as much from this mistaken

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hospitality as from the Druids.

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We hope they had something
better than British brandy
to counteract the effect.

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We have lingered too long
over this frantic trash.

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Hunt, instead of using
the traditional academy space,

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which involves having a pyramid
of the people,

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with the most important
person in the middle, sort of
set slightly back into the canvas,

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he brings everything a long way
forward like a Roman piece
of relief sculpture,

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which makes
the painting modern in that you
get this incredible intimacy.

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You feel incredibly
part of the scene.

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A particularly compelling figure is
this young lad here,

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who's listening at the ground
for the approach of footsteps,

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who looks straight out
at us and we really feel

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like we're on a level with him.

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At the same time, he uses
the trick of 15th century
paintings of dividing space up

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and having little apertures with
secondary scenes in them

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to make the contrast between the mob
and the family and to suggest,

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perhaps, another stage in
this missionary's life, to suggest
the danger that he might be in.

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This is one of my favourite
passages in a painting by Hunt,

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where the water dribbles down
and stains the earth,

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and catches the light
at the end.

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You'll notice that the water
stains the red earth

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so it begins to take
the appearance of spilt blood.

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So we get the suggestion
that this missionary will also
die, he'll also become a martyr.

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And most interestingly, here we
have the first ever appearance

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in a Pre-Raphaelite painting
of one of their most famous models,

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Lizzie Siddal,
who would eventually
appear in many of their paintings.

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Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal was
the daughter of a cutler

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who had been born in Sheffield.

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She was the second eldest
in a large family.

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And the story goes that Lizzie
was working as a milliner when

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she was spotted by Walter Deverell,
who was a close buddy of the PRBs.

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Lizzie was taken up so
enthusiastically because
she was enthusiastic

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about modelling and posing
for them and being with them.

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She obviously entered into
the life of the studios very eagerly.

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The third founding member of
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was the son
of a political refugee from Italy.

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A poet as well as a painter,

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the Bohemian Rossetti dropped out
of the Royal Academy school,

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choosing instead to study
with working painters.

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In 1850, he exhibited
Ecce Ancilla Domini,

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otherwise known as
The Annunciation.

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One of the PRB principles
was not just truth to nature

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but to imagine how scenes from the
past might actually have been like,

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to kind of imbue them
with a lifelike quality,

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and so Rossetti is thinking
what could the Annunciation
really have been like.

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The virgin would not have been in
a neoclassical arcade,

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as she's often depicted
in Italian art.

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So Rossetti's imagining
what it was like in Nazareth.

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So, he's drawn her wearing
a very simple shift

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rather than any elaborate costume.

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What's most striking about the
painting is the foreshortening.

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So the spectator tumbles
right into the picture space.

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There's no foreground distancing
the viewer from the scene depicted.

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And Mary's face comes forward
to meet us in this very unusual
and alarming way.

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And it abandons
the true rules of perspective

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that artists normally followed,
this dramatic foreshortening.

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And that's way before the
post-impressionist challenge
to perspective and framing.

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In addition to that, the Archangel
Gabriel is not a winged creature
in the traditional manner

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but a very corporeal
young man who's actually
naked underneath his kind of gown.

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The only way he's depicted as an
angel is that he's flying on flames
under his feet.

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And one hand is allaying Mary's fear
and the other is thrusting

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the lily stem right at her womb,
and that's the moment of conception.

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And, of course,
Rossetti didn't escape
the attention of the press either.

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The face of the angel
is insipidity itself.

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As shocking as the art itself,
was the audacity of these painters,

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forming a coherent
self-styled movement.

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The first instance of artists with
a manifesto in British art
was met with horror.

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Their ambition is an unhealthy
thirst, which seeks notoriety
by way of mere conceit.

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00:16:44,360 --> 00:16:51,360
..which continues with unabated
absurdity among juvenile artists
who style themselves the PRB.

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As Holman Hunt remarked...

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The storm of abuse was now
turned into a hurricane.

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We hold them to be utterly
heretical and damnable.

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00:17:06,440 --> 00:17:10,040
They paint from nature as an
idiot counts the strokes of a clock.

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The Brothers suddenly found
themselves at the centre
of a national debate.

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But, at the same time,
they knew that outrage

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often provides the pathway to fame.

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And with this in mind,
they moved on from their

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initial religious subjects
to explore scenes of modern life.

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We often think
of French Impressionists and painters

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of that generation as being the ones
who were the first to produce

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compelling scenes of modern life.

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Life in the modern city,
the modern urban world.

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And a very famous point of reference
is Charles Baudelaire's essay

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published in 1863,
The Painter Of Modern Life,

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where he describes a painter,
who goes into the streets

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00:17:58,680 --> 00:18:03,760
of the modern city, and very rapidly
captures the bustle,

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the excitement,
the flurry of modern, urban life.

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Now what's interesting is
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

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were interested in exploring modern
urban life a full decade before that.

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At the heart of this was their
fascination with the role
of women in society.

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00:18:26,920 --> 00:18:29,720
This was sometimes dressed
up in historical guise,

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as in Millais' 1851 painting,
Mariana,

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00:18:32,440 --> 00:18:35,880
where he explores
women's dependence on marriage.

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00:18:35,880 --> 00:18:38,480
The scene is drawn
from a poem by Tennyson.

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The Tennyson poems relate back to
Shakespeare's play Measure For
Measure, which describes

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this character, Mariana, whose dowry
has been lost at sea and
she's been abandoned by her fiance,

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00:18:53,440 --> 00:19:01,160
Angelo and she's sort of stranded
in this moated grange and somehow
lamenting her present day existence.

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00:19:01,160 --> 00:19:06,520
It's an image really of lassitude,
ennui, boredom and frustration.

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00:19:07,720 --> 00:19:13,040
She's at her table working on this
embroidery and she's put a pin down,

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almost in a gesture of frustration.

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00:19:15,880 --> 00:19:21,920
And she's presented in this
extraordinary pose with her hands on
her back as if she's got backache,

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and that correlates to not only
the task she's being doing, but also
it's an expression of her frustration

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and the agony she feels within.

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She's obviously desperate for
a relationship, for fulfilment

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through marriage,
and this is being denied to her.

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00:19:43,160 --> 00:19:46,600
She's being compelled
towards a nun-like existence.

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00:19:46,600 --> 00:19:49,480
On the other hand,
she desires sexual fulfilment.

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And her gaze is looking rather
abstractly at the figure of the Angel
Gabriel on the stained-glass window.

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Gabriel should really be looking
at the figure of the Virgin Mary

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but he's actually looking askance
at Mariana.

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And there are accounts
of women, in particular,
crowding round this picture

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00:20:12,960 --> 00:20:18,000
and really sort of empathising with
the figure of Mariana and her plight.

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00:20:19,520 --> 00:20:22,960
There were more women than there
were men at this particular time.

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So, in a sense, he's addressing
a particular social issue through
the subject from the past.

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00:20:31,960 --> 00:20:38,440
But Holman Hunt, bolder
than Millais, felt no need to dress
his subject up in medieval costume.

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He painted in the here and now,
when in 1853,

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he looked at the role of the kept
woman in The Awakening Conscience.

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00:20:48,560 --> 00:20:51,520
Prostitution was a big issue
for debate at this time

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00:20:51,520 --> 00:20:54,680
in Victorian London especially
amongst the middle classes,

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00:20:54,680 --> 00:20:57,760
who were concerned
about its visibility in the city.

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00:20:57,760 --> 00:21:03,080
And prostitutes also appeared
as marginal figures in
novels and in illustrations.

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00:21:03,080 --> 00:21:08,920
But what is very different about The
Awakening Conscience, is that Hunt
brings the prostitute centre stage.

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It's not a caricature of the
prostitute, it's a portrait,

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which looks into the psychology
of her situation.

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00:21:16,920 --> 00:21:21,160
So, what we see is the young girl
at the centre of the painting,

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together with her protector.

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00:21:25,400 --> 00:21:29,480
Hunt's characteristically set up
a very complex composition here,

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so we actually see the window
to the garden

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00:21:33,240 --> 00:21:37,760
as it's reflected
in a mirror on the back wall.

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00:21:37,760 --> 00:21:41,880
In a sense, he's giving us the whole
view of the room, from the back wall

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00:21:41,880 --> 00:21:45,920
with the mirror on it,
through to the view to the garden.

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00:21:45,920 --> 00:21:51,680
Hunt is looking with fierce intensity
at every detail of the modern scene.

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00:21:51,680 --> 00:21:53,320
He's recording it all.

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00:21:53,320 --> 00:21:58,720
It's like an historic documentation
of a particular moment in time.

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00:21:58,720 --> 00:22:02,560
And he's, in a sense, freezing
that all in the picture for us.

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00:22:05,080 --> 00:22:12,040
It's a relationship, which is
based on beautiful things on the
apparent protectiveness of the man.

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00:22:14,400 --> 00:22:17,480
But we see,
at the bottom of the painting,

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a discarded glove, which
I think is meant to imply

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00:22:20,120 --> 00:22:23,040
that she will be discarded
once he's finished with her.

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00:22:23,040 --> 00:22:27,840
She has just jumped out of his lap.

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00:22:27,840 --> 00:22:34,160
She has just understood
that the life she is living
is not the one she wants.

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00:22:34,160 --> 00:22:36,680
She's understood
the falseness of it.

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00:22:38,000 --> 00:22:40,680
And we can see that,
under the table, there is a cat

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00:22:40,680 --> 00:22:43,720
imitating the pose of the man
with his paw out,

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00:22:43,720 --> 00:22:48,520
and a bird is trying to escape,
trying to fly out of the window.

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00:22:48,520 --> 00:22:52,080
And so we're left in
some uncertainty as to
whether she will escape.

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00:22:59,480 --> 00:23:03,560
Prostitutes were understood to have
a very set future, which involved

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00:23:03,560 --> 00:23:06,560
a slow degradation,
very often suicide.

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00:23:06,560 --> 00:23:10,240
And I think that's linked to the
fact that the model was not just

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a paid model, but somebody whose
life Hunt was very interested in.

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00:23:14,760 --> 00:23:19,560
The model was Annie Miller,
a working girl who
Hunt found in a pub.

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00:23:19,560 --> 00:23:24,800
They started an affair
and Hunt set Annie up in a boarding
house and paid for her education.

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00:23:24,800 --> 00:23:28,640
He intended to marry her,
though he never kept his promise.

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00:23:28,640 --> 00:23:31,520
The Awakening Conscience
mirrored the relationships

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00:23:31,520 --> 00:23:34,600
the Pre-Raphaelites were
developing with their sitters.

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00:23:34,600 --> 00:23:39,840
They were becoming increasingly
attracted to working class women
as both models and mistresses.

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00:23:39,840 --> 00:23:44,760
As such, a kind of Pre-Raphaelite
sisterhood formed,

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00:23:44,760 --> 00:23:47,320
with them appearing
in many of the paintings.

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00:23:47,320 --> 00:23:54,040
Elizabeth Siddal, now Rossetti's
mistress, was joined by Annie Miller

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00:23:54,040 --> 00:23:57,680
and then Fanny Cornforth, who sat
for Rossetti's painting, Found.

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00:24:02,640 --> 00:24:06,240
She's generally identified as
a prostitute but she's probably

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00:24:06,240 --> 00:24:08,720
better described
as a good-time girl.

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00:24:08,720 --> 00:24:12,200
She was willing to go with any man
who she fancied to supper rooms

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00:24:12,200 --> 00:24:15,880
and dance halls
and she was certainly unescorted

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00:24:15,880 --> 00:24:19,880
when Rossetti met her in
the Thames-side pleasure gardens

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00:24:19,880 --> 00:24:23,560
and accidentally dislodged her bonnet

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00:24:23,560 --> 00:24:26,960
and loosening a whole
wealth of corn-coloured hair.

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00:24:26,960 --> 00:24:31,400
She was a true stunner and at once,
Rossetti took Fanny to his studio,

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00:24:31,400 --> 00:24:33,880
positioned her head against the wall

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00:24:33,880 --> 00:24:38,760
and drew the careful study that
forms the basis for the painting.

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00:24:40,720 --> 00:24:44,200
In Found,
Rossetti paints the prostitute

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00:24:44,200 --> 00:24:47,960
at her most desperate state,
when the end of the road is near.

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00:24:47,960 --> 00:24:52,640
It shows the fate of a former
country girl laid low by urban vice.

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00:24:54,000 --> 00:24:55,800
It's dawn in London.

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00:24:55,800 --> 00:24:59,400
A countryman has come up to town
to bring his calf for market.

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00:24:59,400 --> 00:25:03,760
He spots his former sweetheart,
who recoils in shame.

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00:25:03,760 --> 00:25:09,240
To underline the symbolic nature of
the encounter, the poor little calf,

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00:25:09,240 --> 00:25:13,160
which is on the way to slaughter,
is held under a net,

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00:25:13,160 --> 00:25:17,280
which is symbolic
of the net that sin and shame

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00:25:17,280 --> 00:25:20,760
have trapped the young woman in.

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00:25:20,760 --> 00:25:24,960
The chief focus of the painting
is the intertwined hands,

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00:25:24,960 --> 00:25:29,000
which the drover or carter
is grasping the woman

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00:25:29,000 --> 00:25:36,400
by her wrists and she's pulling away,
trying to wriggle out from his grasp.

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00:25:41,000 --> 00:25:45,040
Rossetti would continue to work
on Found over many years,

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00:25:45,040 --> 00:25:47,960
but eventually
set it aside, unfinished.

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00:25:53,000 --> 00:25:55,960
Within a few years of
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's

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00:25:55,960 --> 00:26:01,760
foundation in 1848,
they had achieved their aim
of reforming British art.

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00:26:02,840 --> 00:26:06,320
They had brought
a new realism to the table.

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00:26:06,320 --> 00:26:09,360
They had upturned
the rules of composition.

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00:26:11,480 --> 00:26:15,280
They introduced
new painting techniques

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00:26:15,280 --> 00:26:18,840
and new subject matters.

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00:26:22,200 --> 00:26:26,200
But they were still
critically damned,
and they faced a bleak future.

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00:26:26,200 --> 00:26:29,600
Their work didn't sell
and they were short of money.

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00:26:32,800 --> 00:26:36,640
But then,
an unexpected saviour came along.

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00:26:36,640 --> 00:26:39,640
John Ruskin,
the author of Modern Painters,

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00:26:39,640 --> 00:26:43,320
was a critic of almost unprecedented
power in the art world.

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00:26:43,320 --> 00:26:45,560
And at the vanguard
of cultural thinking.

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00:26:47,240 --> 00:26:52,920
He had kept quiet for two years,
reading the abuse the
Pre-Raphaelites had suffered

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00:26:52,920 --> 00:26:58,240
in the press, but then he
decided to put pen to paper
in a letter to The Times

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00:26:58,240 --> 00:27:00,440
to support the young rebels.

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00:27:03,080 --> 00:27:07,440
These Pre-Raphaelites
will draw either what they see,
or what they suppose

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00:27:07,440 --> 00:27:11,120
might have been the actual facts of
the scene they desire to represent,

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00:27:11,120 --> 00:27:15,480
irrespective of any conventional
rules of picture making.

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00:27:15,480 --> 00:27:18,720
When Ruskin's letter
appeared in The Times,

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00:27:18,720 --> 00:27:23,240
it was as if the
gods had come down

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00:27:23,240 --> 00:27:27,520
from their Olympian heights,
and bestowed benefaction
on the Pre-Raphaelites.

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00:27:27,520 --> 00:27:29,360
Suddenly they could do no wrong.

354
00:27:29,360 --> 00:27:32,200
Everyone knew that this
man was quite extraordinary.

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00:27:32,200 --> 00:27:35,560
Everyone trusted his judgment because
his ideas were so fresh,

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00:27:35,560 --> 00:27:39,120
exciting, and they really struck
a chord with the Victorian public.

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00:27:39,120 --> 00:27:44,120
A word from John Ruskin was
enough to make or break an artist.

358
00:27:46,080 --> 00:27:51,280
They may, as they gain experience,
lay in our England, the foundations

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00:27:51,280 --> 00:27:55,600
of a school of art nobler than
the world has seen for 300 years.

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00:27:59,080 --> 00:28:03,000
This marked a turning point
in the Pre-Raphaelites' fortunes.

361
00:28:04,960 --> 00:28:08,880
Now with Ruskin's backing,
the abuse in the press fell away.

362
00:28:08,880 --> 00:28:12,800
They could continue with
their revolutionary ambitions,

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00:28:12,800 --> 00:28:16,720
safe in the knowledge their
future careers were secure.

364
00:28:16,720 --> 00:28:22,600
Despite all the hardships,
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
had finally won the battle.

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00:28:22,600 --> 00:28:26,880
British art would
never be the same again.

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