The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood brought notoriety to British art in the 19th century.
Bursting into the spotlight mid-century,
they shocked their peers with a new kind of radical art.
This programme explores the origins of the Brotherhood, their initial achievements
and the centuries of dogma their paintings overturned.
For many, the idea of Pre-Raphaelite art is informed by images
of luscious, long-haired women
or of sentimental, chocolate-box children.
But the Brotherhood's early work was very different from these later works associated with them.
Their first paintings controversially applied a bold new realism to sacred subjects.
And then, a decade before the French Impressionists,
their brushes captured insalubrious subjects from urban life.
Such was the outrage that their work caused,
one eminent Victorian dedicated the front page of his magazine to the venting of his disgust.
You behold the interior of a carpenter's shop.
In the foreground of that carpenter's shop is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy,
in a bed-gown, who appears to have received a poke in the hand from the stick of another boy with whom
he has been playing in an adjacent gutter,
and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman,
so horrible in her ugliness, that she would stand out from
the rest of the company as a monster in the vilest cabaret in France,
or the lowest gin shop in England.
Wherever it is possible to express ugliness of feature, limb, or attitude, you have it expressed.
The year was 1850, the critic was the darling of the nation, Charles Dickens, and the painter in question
was the 21-year-old Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais.
His picture, Christ In The House Of His Parents,
showed Christ in his father's workshop.
It was painted to provoke, and it had not failed.
They were all very young, still only about 20.
And they wanted to make their mark, they wanted it all,
fame, riches, girls, whatever they could get.
And what they wanted was revolution.
The Brotherhood was founded in 1848,
when revolution of a different kind was spreading across Europe,
and Karl Marx published his Communist Manifesto.
Fired by the political turmoil around them,
John Everett Millais, and two fellow students at the Royal Academy School,
William Holman Hunt, then aged 21...
..and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 20, decided to overturn British art.
They all had a similar aim. They were all rather dissatisfied
with the teaching they were receiving at the Academy.
They wanted to work as part of a group and get inspiration from their peers.
They all agreed that during the early 19th century,
British art had become lazy, predictable and boring,
so they sympathised with the art scholar John Ruskin when he complained of...
The eternal brown cows in ditches and white sails in squalls
and sliced lemons in saucers and foolish faces in simpers.
It's important to remember that the Pre-Raphaelite group was interested
in literature and poetry as much as visual art from the very start.
So, in a move to restore meaning to art, they decided to paint moral,
significant subjects drawn from literature and the Bible.
And they reversed the sterile academic tradition they had all been encouraged to emulate
at the Royal Academy, of form, colour and composition
as embodied in the work of the 16th century artist Raphael.
But as Hunt complained...
Why should the composition be always apexed in pyramids?
Why should the highest light always be on the principal figure?
Why make one corner of the picture always in the shade?
Millais, Hunt and Rossetti set up a group
that would offer an alternative to this Academy dogma,
and recruited four other like-minded thinkers,
including Rossetti's brother William, who wrote...
We were really like brothers, continually together and confiding
to one another all experience bearing on questions of art and literature
and many affecting us as individuals.
At one such meeting, Hunt brought along a book of engravings
of the 15th-century frescoes in the Campo de Santo at Pisa.
Art that pre-dated Raphael.
Here they saw no pyramid structure, no idealised subjects.
But an attempt by an early Italian artist to capture life as it was.
As Hunt said...
It was probably the finding of this book which caused the establishment of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Millais, Rossetti and myself were all seeking some sure ground, some new starting point for our new art.
Here at last was no trace of decline, no conventionality, no arrogance.
Notice it's not Pre-Raphael.
The word is actually Pre-Raphaelite,
so it means before the Raphaelites, who were the followers of Raphael.
Now the idea here is that Raphael himself was a great artist,
a great artist of the High Renaissance, just after 1500,
but that his style had got conventionalised,
made into a formula by his students
and the next generations after that.
Those are the Raphaelites, the followers, the imitators.
And that's what the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is completely rejecting.
Millais's Christ In The House With His Parents marked his attempt
to portray a lifelike scene rather than an idealised one.
With crisp detail and a composition that brushed away Academy rules,
it came as a complete shock to an unsuspecting public.
This painting was revolutionary on a number of levels.
Firstly, when it appeared in public it appeared completely audacious
because of the way it was composed.
It was seen to break all the rules of composing great paintings.
But coupled with that, you have this sort of audacious realism,
which is what's really shocking.
And the idea is he's playing fast and loose with sacred imagery
and in doing so he's really sticking his fingers up at the established way to present religious painting.
Millais' audacity is clear, when his work is compared to that of one of his contemporaries.
J R Herbert's picture of the same subject
follows the Royal Academy's expectations
with two simple groupings,
Joseph and Mary on the right,
and an angelic-faced Jesus isolated against the background on the left.
Millais', by contrast, was far less saccharine.
Millais was painting Christ as a street urchin.
And what's also audacious is the attention to body parts of the figures, rather than,
as in the Herbert painting, the faces being smooth,
idealised with no wrinkles or blemishes,
here you have Joseph with his sunburned hands, his veins protruding.
His broken dirty toenails.
The figure of Christ, too. You can see how his nails haven't been cut.
Mary, the veins in her hands, the swollen hands of St Anne
as they would be in a woman of that particular age.
The blood actually looks real and visceral.
To get the sheep, making them look vivid in the background,
he obtained sheep heads from a butcher's.
So there was this real attention on all those areas you would normally edit out of a painting.
The fact Millais has made a point of making them quite clear and apparent to the viewer,
that was considered to be really audacious and shocking, quite blasphemous in a way.
How dare you treat Jesus or Christ like that?
Shocking too were the technical aspects of Millais' work.
The forensic detail of Millais' brushstrokes on the fur on John the Baptist's covering,
in which every hair is separately shown, was unprecedented.
The public were unused to this literal style.
They had grown up on more painterly approaches typified by artists
such as Edwin Landseer who depicted fur, such as that on this donkey,
with a uniform area of smooth brown using a large brush.
But the press couldn't stomach Millais' almost photographic sense of detail.
The attempt to associate the Holy Family with no conceivable omission
of misery, of dirt and even disease, is disgusting.
Such criticism was a novelty for Millais.
He was the youngest ever student to enter the Royal Academy School,
at the age of 11, and became their star pupil.
His affront to the institution that had nurtured him was therefore all the more shocking.
Wanting to know what all the fuss was about, Queen Victoria sent
"to have the painting brought from the walls of the RA."
"I hope it will not have any bad effect on her mind," Millais joked.
22-year-old William Holman Hunt had entered the Academy after hard graft.
From a trade background, he had faced parental opposition to his decision to be an artist.
But in the same year as Millais' Carpenter's Shop,
he exhibited an equally radical painting
of early Roman missionaries
converting a British family to Christianity.
But the critics were equally damning.
What had Mr Hunt eaten for his supper when these incongruities came into his head?
The British grapes have had their effect on both the missionaries,
who seem to have suffered quite as much from this mistaken
hospitality as from the Druids.
We hope they had something better than British brandy to counteract the effect.
We have lingered too long over this frantic trash.
Hunt, instead of using the traditional academy space,
which involves having a pyramid of the people,
with the most important person in the middle, sort of set slightly back into the canvas,
he brings everything a long way forward like a Roman piece of relief sculpture,
which makes the painting modern in that you get this incredible intimacy.
You feel incredibly part of the scene.
A particularly compelling figure is this young lad here,
who's listening at the ground for the approach of footsteps,
who looks straight out at us and we really feel
like we're on a level with him.
At the same time, he uses the trick of 15th century paintings of dividing space up
and having little apertures with secondary scenes in them
to make the contrast between the mob and the family and to suggest,
perhaps, another stage in this missionary's life, to suggest the danger that he might be in.
This is one of my favourite passages in a painting by Hunt,
where the water dribbles down and stains the earth,
and catches the light at the end.
You'll notice that the water stains the red earth
so it begins to take the appearance of spilt blood.
So we get the suggestion that this missionary will also die, he'll also become a martyr.
And most interestingly, here we have the first ever appearance
in a Pre-Raphaelite painting of one of their most famous models,
Lizzie Siddal, who would eventually appear in many of their paintings.
Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal was the daughter of a cutler
who had been born in Sheffield.
She was the second eldest in a large family.
And the story goes that Lizzie was working as a milliner when
she was spotted by Walter Deverell, who was a close buddy of the PRBs.
Lizzie was taken up so enthusiastically because she was enthusiastic
about modelling and posing for them and being with them.
She obviously entered into the life of the studios very eagerly.
The third founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was the son of a political refugee from Italy.
A poet as well as a painter,
the Bohemian Rossetti dropped out of the Royal Academy school,
choosing instead to study with working painters.
In 1850, he exhibited Ecce Ancilla Domini,
otherwise known as The Annunciation.
One of the PRB principles was not just truth to nature
but to imagine how scenes from the past might actually have been like,
to kind of imbue them with a lifelike quality,
and so Rossetti is thinking what could the Annunciation really have been like.
The virgin would not have been in a neoclassical arcade,
as she's often depicted in Italian art.
So Rossetti's imagining what it was like in Nazareth.
So, he's drawn her wearing a very simple shift
rather than any elaborate costume.
What's most striking about the painting is the foreshortening.
So the spectator tumbles right into the picture space.
There's no foreground distancing the viewer from the scene depicted.
And Mary's face comes forward to meet us in this very unusual and alarming way.
And it abandons the true rules of perspective
that artists normally followed, this dramatic foreshortening.
And that's way before the post-impressionist challenge to perspective and framing.
In addition to that, the Archangel Gabriel is not a winged creature in the traditional manner
but a very corporeal young man who's actually naked underneath his kind of gown.
The only way he's depicted as an angel is that he's flying on flames under his feet.
And one hand is allaying Mary's fear and the other is thrusting
the lily stem right at her womb, and that's the moment of conception.
And, of course, Rossetti didn't escape the attention of the press either.
The face of the angel is insipidity itself.
As shocking as the art itself, was the audacity of these painters,
forming a coherent self-styled movement.
The first instance of artists with a manifesto in British art was met with horror.
Their ambition is an unhealthy thirst, which seeks notoriety by way of mere conceit.
..which continues with unabated absurdity among juvenile artists who style themselves the PRB.
As Holman Hunt remarked...
The storm of abuse was now turned into a hurricane.
We hold them to be utterly heretical and damnable.
They paint from nature as an idiot counts the strokes of a clock.
The Brothers suddenly found themselves at the centre of a national debate.
But, at the same time, they knew that outrage
often provides the pathway to fame.
And with this in mind, they moved on from their
initial religious subjects to explore scenes of modern life.
We often think of French Impressionists and painters
of that generation as being the ones who were the first to produce
compelling scenes of modern life.
Life in the modern city, the modern urban world.
And a very famous point of reference is Charles Baudelaire's essay
published in 1863, The Painter Of Modern Life,
where he describes a painter, who goes into the streets
of the modern city, and very rapidly captures the bustle,
the excitement, the flurry of modern, urban life.
Now what's interesting is the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
were interested in exploring modern urban life a full decade before that.
At the heart of this was their fascination with the role of women in society.
This was sometimes dressed up in historical guise,
as in Millais' 1851 painting, Mariana,
where he explores women's dependence on marriage.
The scene is drawn from a poem by Tennyson.
The Tennyson poems relate back to Shakespeare's play Measure For Measure, which describes
this character, Mariana, whose dowry has been lost at sea and she's been abandoned by her fiance,
Angelo and she's sort of stranded in this moated grange and somehow lamenting her present day existence.
It's an image really of lassitude, ennui, boredom and frustration.
She's at her table working on this embroidery and she's put a pin down,
almost in a gesture of frustration.
And she's presented in this extraordinary pose with her hands on her back as if she's got backache,
and that correlates to not only the task she's being doing, but also it's an expression of her frustration
and the agony she feels within.
She's obviously desperate for a relationship, for fulfilment
through marriage, and this is being denied to her.
She's being compelled towards a nun-like existence.
On the other hand, she desires sexual fulfilment.
And her gaze is looking rather abstractly at the figure of the Angel Gabriel on the stained-glass window.
Gabriel should really be looking at the figure of the Virgin Mary
but he's actually looking askance at Mariana.
And there are accounts of women, in particular, crowding round this picture
and really sort of empathising with the figure of Mariana and her plight.
There were more women than there were men at this particular time.
So, in a sense, he's addressing a particular social issue through the subject from the past.
But Holman Hunt, bolder than Millais, felt no need to dress his subject up in medieval costume.
He painted in the here and now, when in 1853,
he looked at the role of the kept woman in The Awakening Conscience.
Prostitution was a big issue for debate at this time
in Victorian London especially amongst the middle classes,
who were concerned about its visibility in the city.
And prostitutes also appeared as marginal figures in novels and in illustrations.
But what is very different about The Awakening Conscience, is that Hunt brings the prostitute centre stage.
It's not a caricature of the prostitute, it's a portrait,
which looks into the psychology of her situation.
So, what we see is the young girl at the centre of the painting,
together with her protector.
Hunt's characteristically set up a very complex composition here,
so we actually see the window to the garden
as it's reflected in a mirror on the back wall.
In a sense, he's giving us the whole view of the room, from the back wall
with the mirror on it, through to the view to the garden.
Hunt is looking with fierce intensity at every detail of the modern scene.
He's recording it all.
It's like an historic documentation of a particular moment in time.
And he's, in a sense, freezing that all in the picture for us.
It's a relationship, which is based on beautiful things on the apparent protectiveness of the man.
But we see, at the bottom of the painting,
a discarded glove, which I think is meant to imply
that she will be discarded once he's finished with her.
She has just jumped out of his lap.
She has just understood that the life she is living is not the one she wants.
She's understood the falseness of it.
And we can see that, under the table, there is a cat
imitating the pose of the man with his paw out,
and a bird is trying to escape, trying to fly out of the window.
And so we're left in some uncertainty as to whether she will escape.
Prostitutes were understood to have a very set future, which involved
a slow degradation, very often suicide.
And I think that's linked to the fact that the model was not just
a paid model, but somebody whose life Hunt was very interested in.
The model was Annie Miller, a working girl who Hunt found in a pub.
They started an affair and Hunt set Annie up in a boarding house and paid for her education.
He intended to marry her, though he never kept his promise.
The Awakening Conscience mirrored the relationships
the Pre-Raphaelites were developing with their sitters.
They were becoming increasingly attracted to working class women as both models and mistresses.
As such, a kind of Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood formed,
with them appearing in many of the paintings.
Elizabeth Siddal, now Rossetti's mistress, was joined by Annie Miller
and then Fanny Cornforth, who sat for Rossetti's painting, Found.
She's generally identified as a prostitute but she's probably
better described as a good-time girl.
She was willing to go with any man who she fancied to supper rooms
and dance halls and she was certainly unescorted
when Rossetti met her in the Thames-side pleasure gardens
and accidentally dislodged her bonnet
and loosening a whole wealth of corn-coloured hair.
She was a true stunner and at once, Rossetti took Fanny to his studio,
positioned her head against the wall
and drew the careful study that forms the basis for the painting.
In Found, Rossetti paints the prostitute
at her most desperate state, when the end of the road is near.
It shows the fate of a former country girl laid low by urban vice.
It's dawn in London.
A countryman has come up to town to bring his calf for market.
He spots his former sweetheart, who recoils in shame.
To underline the symbolic nature of the encounter, the poor little calf,
which is on the way to slaughter, is held under a net,
which is symbolic of the net that sin and shame
have trapped the young woman in.
The chief focus of the painting is the intertwined hands,
which the drover or carter is grasping the woman
by her wrists and she's pulling away, trying to wriggle out from his grasp.
Rossetti would continue to work on Found over many years,
but eventually set it aside, unfinished.
Within a few years of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's
foundation in 1848, they had achieved their aim of reforming British art.
They had brought a new realism to the table.
They had upturned the rules of composition.
They introduced new painting techniques
and new subject matters.
But they were still critically damned, and they faced a bleak future.
Their work didn't sell and they were short of money.
But then, an unexpected saviour came along.
John Ruskin, the author of Modern Painters,
was a critic of almost unprecedented power in the art world.
And at the vanguard of cultural thinking.
He had kept quiet for two years, reading the abuse the Pre-Raphaelites had suffered
in the press, but then he decided to put pen to paper in a letter to The Times
to support the young rebels.
These Pre-Raphaelites will draw either what they see, or what they suppose
might have been the actual facts of the scene they desire to represent,
irrespective of any conventional rules of picture making.
When Ruskin's letter appeared in The Times,
it was as if the gods had come down
from their Olympian heights, and bestowed benefaction on the Pre-Raphaelites.
Suddenly they could do no wrong.
Everyone knew that this man was quite extraordinary.
Everyone trusted his judgment because his ideas were so fresh,
exciting, and they really struck a chord with the Victorian public.
A word from John Ruskin was enough to make or break an artist.
They may, as they gain experience, lay in our England, the foundations
of a school of art nobler than the world has seen for 300 years.
This marked a turning point in the Pre-Raphaelites' fortunes.
Now with Ruskin's backing, the abuse in the press fell away.
They could continue with their revolutionary ambitions,
safe in the knowledge their future careers were secure.
Despite all the hardships, The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had finally won the battle.
British art would never be the same again.
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