The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood brought notoriety to British art in the 19th century.
Bursting into the spotlight in the mid century,
they shocked their peers with a new kind of radical art.
This programme explores how they began a new chapter in the history of art,
transforming landscape painting with a microscopic examination of the natural world.
I think all artists working at this time would have been aware of natural history.
So it was important that their paintings did reflect something of this interest
and this curiosity about the natural world, and wanting to understand it.
The idea of painting the landscape as it really is
with a kind of scientific fidelity was at the heart of this.
WHISTLE BLOWS
By 1850, the Industrial Revolution was at its height,
coinciding with a revolution that was taking place in British art.
The Pre-Raphaelite's founding members John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt,
and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had created a critical storm by bringing a new realism to British art.
And now with the expanding rail network offering quick travel to the countryside,
they ventured outside London
and turned their attention to a landscape that had only just become accessible to them.
Painting all details outside was new, and predated the Impressionists by ten years.
Traditionally, landscape painting was executed in the studio from sketches.
But the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group who embraced experimentation.
Although embarking on such an excursion demanded preparation.
First, they had to prepare their paints.
Powdered coloured pigments were grounded with a glass muller,
then mixed together with an oil based matter.
The paint was then put into a pig's bladder for transportation.
They would then have to find protection against any inclement weather conditions.
Only then could they pack their easels and canvases and board the train.
Millais and Hunt in particular were eager to paint what was real with a new microscopic precession,
so in 1851 they took advantage of the south east rail line extension
and set off for Surrey, with Millais deciding on Hogsmill River for the setting of his picture.
It was to become one of THE most famous paintings in British art,
and one that transformed the landscape genre - Ophelia.
It's based on Shakespeare's play Hamlet on the scene where Gertrude,
Queen Gertrude describes the tragic death of Ophelia.
Ophelia is Hamlet's betrothed.
She's been rejected by him and, after the death of Polonius her father,
she's been driven out of her mind and it shows her pathetic and tragic death
when she's singing songs, gathering flowers, slips into a brook
and is dragged by the weight of her garments underneath the waters to her murky depth.
It goes against the rules of composing pictures.
Usually we read images in the West from left to right, but of course the flow of the river
is from right to left so he's actually doing something sort of quite counter-intuitive in a way
and perhaps in doing so is inviting us to look at this image
as being a very disturbing image, which indeed it is.
He's the first artist to actually show Ophelia in the process of drowning.
Millais was quite concerned to relay the natural elements to the story of Ophelia
so a lot of attention has been spent on the natural specimens.
The Dog Rose, that obviously eludes to the rose in the Gertrude speech.
You also have the long purples Shakespeare refers to
indicated here by this Loosestrife on the right-hand side.
You have these daisies scattered in the composition.
So obviously he starts off with Shakespeare's text,
but goes beyond that to include flowers
which really relate symbolically to the plight of Ophelia.
A professor of botany thought it was better to teach botany to his students from Millais' painting
than it was in taking them on a field trip into the country
so accurate and precise was his depiction of natural phenomena.
So you could actually read this as a pre-Darwinian image, really, that it's a struggle for existence.
All these plants here are struggling for survival on this riverbank.
Ophelia's one of these specimens, but being the weaker of the species,
she's doomed to die rather than survive
so he's obviously looking at human history, even though it's a pre-Darwinian image.
Once Millais had painted all the landscape, he went back to London to sketch the figure of Ophelia.
This in itself reversed the normal practise.
His model was the 19-year-old Elizabeth Siddal
who had already posed for a number of Pre-Raphaelite pictures.
Lizzie posed for Millais lying in a tin bath, heated by just a few candles.
But so preoccupied was he that he didn't notice when the candles went out.
Afraid to mention anything, Lizzie remained in the pose, getting numb with cold.
It was the last time she sat for Millais.
But despite this the painting was exhibited to huge acclaim.
Ophelia's a really important painting for Millais because it really marks the breaking point,
from being an enfant terrible, someone who's desecrated by the critics, the subject of opprobrium.
Suddenly, people see this picture and they think, "Wow!"
This artist is doing something completely new and different,
but rather than alienating his audience he's eliciting the sympathy of the spectator.
And there's a wonderful view of this painting by Tom Taylor in Punch.
He says it brings tears to his eyes that he is an artist who has actually managed to make dying beautiful.
Just as Millais was examining the landscape with the eye of a camera,
William Holman Hunt was also applying his own detailed vision of the natural world
in a field close by, painting The Hireling Shepherd.
Hunt was keen to get a sense of the luminosity of nature as it actually looked under the vivid sun.
To achieve this he departed from the norm of painting onto a dark backing
by preparing his canvas with a white ground.
This had the effect of illuminating the colours far more brightly.
He would then use a very fine brush, more like a watercolour brush to paint the minute detail.
Every blade of grass,
each eyelash.
Such precision would often mean only an inch of canvas could be completed in a day.
This scrutiny and demanding work chimed with the Victorian obsession
with technological progress and scientific thinking,
which was eagerly promoted by the art critic and ardent geologist, John Ruskin.
Ruskin said simply you should go to nature in all singleness of heart
rejecting and selecting nothing, and believing always in the truth.
So the idea of painting the landscape as it really is
with a kind of scientific fidelity was at the heart of this.
Ruskin saw how Millais's scientific fidelity had achieved a sense of majesty in its detail.
So he commissioned him to paint his portrait.
But this was to be no ordinary portrait.
Under Ruskin's guidance, Millais was to turn his formidable technical skill
in painting the detail of the Scottish landscape.
Historic landscape painting, as Ruskin called it.
So off they all went. This is Ruskin, his wife, Effie,
who he'd married in 1848, same time as the Brotherhood was formed,
and, um...Millais',
and Millais' brother, Wiliam Henry, who's also a painter, and, of course, Ruskin's manservant, Crawley.
They went up together and stayed in this tiny - and I mean tiny - little sort of farmhouse
at the little village of Brig O' Turk
in Glenfinlas in the Trossachs.
At Brig O' Turk Ruskin and Millais found the perfect site.
At the bottom of a steep ravine, a stream ran over some ancient rocks.
The view had no horizon - this in itself would be an innovation in landscape portraiture,
but would give Millais the setting to which he could turn his camera's eye.
I think one of the reasons Ruskin was attracted to this particular site was because of the rock.
The rocks he was passionate about are what he called the "slatey crystallines",
the prime example of which was this gneiss rock.
He loved this because of its banding,
how it was composed of different minerals.
It's quite interesting how he wants to be associated with it in this portrait.
The idea that this rock has this ennobling effect.
So he's presented in the portrait standing on the rock,
the idea that there are parallels between the two.
Between his steadfast, fixed gaze and the firmness of the rock.
So the idea is, the rock's are to be read in ethical and moral terms.
RUNNING WATER
And whilst Millais painted the details of the landscape,
Ruskin, a fine draftsman and water colour artist in his own right,
sketched the rock in the background of the portrait, keeping a watchful eye on what Millais was doing.
RUNNING WATER CONTINUES
Ruskin focuses in on a patch of rock in the distance.
It's quite interesting comparing the way the two artists approach this.
Millais is obviously fascinated with the surface.
He attends to the lichen on the rocks, the textural patterns.
I think Ruskin is far more interested in the structure, the gneissic banding.
He picks out these quartz veins in the rock which you don't get in Millais' composition.
So, as an artist, he is far more aware of how these rocks have been formed,
the movement of water, and how they came to be.
Years and years ago when the molten rock cooled and hardened as part of this particular process.
Ruskin was very keen on this portrait.
He obviously saw it as being a collaborative process.
He was instructing Millais in geology,
and, in turn, Millais was instructing him about painting out of doors.
The relationship between Millais and Ruskin was not the only one developing during this holiday.
Whilst living together in the confined space of the cottage,
Millais discovered he was falling in love with Ruskin's wife, Effie.
When she revealed that, despite five years of marriage, she was still a virgin,
Millais, at first shocked, began to see an opportunity for them to be together.
Evident in some of his sketches of the time.
We brought this rather beautiful drawing here, which is of angels forming a gothic arch.
Of course they are Effie.
We took the back of that drawing to get it conserved, and on the back, hidden since the 1850's, was that.
Instead of two angels are Millais and Effie caressing.
I suppose it's wishful thinking, but it's very beautiful.
Well, not so wishful.
A year after the Scottish trip, Effie attained an annulment to her marriage
on the grounds of non-consummation with Ruskin.
And, in 1855, she married Millais.
The relationship between Ruskin and Millais, that also changed, really.
Millais couldn't stand the sight of him,
and he couldn't understand why Ruskin was almost supine in the face of all these accusations.
The only spark that Ruskin showed was when the marriage was being annulled,
he offered to prove to the court, bizarrely, his manhood,
and it's very difficult to imagine how he could have done that, but he offered it.
I've no idea, it would have been fascinating if the judge had said, "Yes, Ruskin, you really should."
Such public humiliation made any future working relationship between Ruskin and Millais impossible.
So Ruskin, perhaps for spite,
diverted his patronage to the third founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Ruskin was much taken with Rossetti's watercolour,
The First Anniversary Of The Death Of Beatrice.
Dante drawing the angel, painted in 1853.
Rossetti's interests were diverging from those of his fellow brothers.
While they were pursuing "realism",
the earlier Pre-Raphaelite interest in medievalism was dominating his work.
Ruskin offered Rossetti first refusal on all his works, which freed him from the need to exhibit.
He also offered Rossetti's mistress, the Pre-Raphaelite model Lizzie Siddell,
featured in Dante Drawing An Angel,
an annual income in support of her own ambitions to become an artist.
Elizabeth Siddal was just over a year younger than Rossetti
so she had been working I think in the fashion trades
for quite a few years
before she became the PRB's sort of favourite model.
And she posed for a whole sequence of paintings by other members of the group.
And then she went to pose for Rossetti.
At that moment, her own dreams began to be realised
because it turned out she had artistic ambitions of her own.
And at this moment, Rossetti transformed Lizzie
from an ordinary model into his sweetheart and his student.
He believed that Lizzie's talent was best served
by allowing her to draw and paint
in the naive manner, without any instruction,
which explains why her drawings have a very child-like character.
They're very intensely emotional,
but the drawing and particularly the anatomy is very primitive.
And whilst Rossetti and Lizzie explored the medieval fantasy world,
the other members of the Pre-Raphaelites continued with their fascination
of the burgeoning sciences of Victorian Britain.
All artists working at this time would have been aware of natural history.
The text they would've been aware of was Charles Lyle's Principles Of Geology, which was widely read
and was really a wonderful survey of geological formations and structures in the British Isles.
I think they wanted to be part of that culture.
They were modern British artists. They were painting for a contemporary audience.
So it was important that their paintings
did reflect something of this interest,
and this curiosity about the natural world, and wanting to understand it.
WHISTLE BLOWS
Holman Hunt's curiosity led him to board the train down to Hastings in 1852
to paint land scientists were beginning to classify as a prime example of coastal erosion.
He showed it in his painting Our English Coasts, or Lost Sheep, as it's also known.
Hunt has painted very carefully the geological formations of the coastline,
and it's not a grand, magnificent cliff like Dover Cliffs.
It's actually a piece of collapsing coastline and so the actual geology of the rocks
seem to express the anxiety that we see in the lost sheep,
and this relates to research that's going on in this time into geology.
Our English Coast depicts these extraordinary cliffs at Covehurst Bay near Hastings,
and assembles sheep at the very brink of these cliffs
as a metaphor for what is going on in Britain at this time.
This is exactly the moment Napoleon III has come to power in Paris,
when there is a feeling that there might be a renewal of the hostilities of the Napoleonic Wars.
Hunt expresses this idea with the idea of the lost sheep standing at the edge of the cliff.
Hunt stresses the modernity of that scene
with the tiny steamship which travels across the horizon in the background,
so that he turns the landscape with all its extraordinary detail
into a much richer picture that becomes a kind of condition of England picture.
We see one sheep here who's caught in the brambles and who looks straight at us in a kind of appealing way,
very typical technique of Hunt to get us involved in the painting.
We see the shadows, a blue shadow lengthening across the green fields in the background
in a slightly ominous manner. The painting is painted at the end of the day to add to the atmosphere.
We can even see the light coming through the sheep's ear.
Capturing such naturalistic light effects interested another painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelites,
Ford Madox Brown, in his painting of 1852, Pretty Baa Lambs.
So he takes up some of the Pre-Raphaelite ideas
about responding to nature
and he applies his own particular interest in light effects.
He doesn't just paint the landscape out of doors, he actually poses his figures out of doors
and paints the entire scene so there's consistent conditions of light, bright sunlight,
over the figure as well as the landscape.
Now as far as I know that's the first time it's been done in painting.
So Ford Madox Brown is actually doing something really novel
by making his model stand out in the hot sunshine, you can see her cheeks are pretty red.
The painting is the first to represent figures in the open air
and in the conditions of sunlight that are particular to a specific moment.
That is really the middle of the day.
Another way in which it's the first is observing all of the details,
such as the coloured shadow.
The baby is holding a little sprig of foliage,
which casts a blue shadow on its white dress.
Again, this is an innovation that is definitely observed from nature.
Shadows are coloured, they're not just dark.
He's not painting according to the rules of painting,
he's actually painting by fresh, new observation of what's before his eyes.
That I think is the idea behind it being a new chapter, a new event in the history of art.
Ford Madox Brown was slightly older than the other Pre-Raphaelites.
He was never a fully-fledged member of the Brotherhood,
but rather a close associate and supportive elder brother
whose work both inspired and drew inspiration from them.
But in contrast to Millais and Hunt, Brown wasn't interested in using the steam train
to travel for his landscape painting, he'd much rather stay at home.
In 1852, Ford Maddox Brown moved to Hampstead,
which was then just outside London.
And for my money, the most extraordinary Pre-Raphaelite painting of a landscape
is the work he completed out of the window of his lodgings in Hampstead looking over Hampstead Heath.
An English Autumn Afternoon.
Begun in 1852, and he worked on it solidly for three years,
Every single detail that was visible out of that rear window can be seen in this canvas.
It completely contravenes every rule in the book.
It doesn't look like any landscape painting ever made before.
It's panoramic in scope, but it has no vertical features to disturb that flat horizon.
It's also microscopic in it's examination of the natural world.
It's like a work of science, on the one hand, a kind of treatise on the life of North London in 1852,
and on the other hand, it's this incredibly evocative and poetic account
of the way Maddox Brown feels about this landscape as well.
He manages to be both deeply objective and deeply subjective, at the same time.
The shape of the canvas is an unusual one.
It looks like a great eye, it's an oval, and I've always imagined that as a metaphor
for some great optical apparatus,
and it's worth thinking, these paintings come from the early years of photography.
It's almost as if Maddox Brown's saying,
'The camera can represent this world, but only in sepia and white,
The camera can show us details, but only the artist can actually see the detail represented
and interpret its meaning.
This is one of the great, poetic paintings
as well as one of the great representations of reality in British art.
So in An English Autumn Afternoon, Maddox Brown shows us a very familiar scene,
and we're invited to identify the two figures down to the bottom left, a young girl and her friend.
It's 3pm, and he particularly wants you to notice the effect of colour in the sky,
the kind of duck egg blue sky just before the sun sets over Hampstead Heath in that moment of the day.
You can see that colour reflected on the shiny top of the boy's hat.
If you look in more closely at what is going on in the middle ground,
you can see people picking apples.
You can see cockerels and hens, which are being farmed on the Heath.
In the foreground there's a dovecot with just the activity of birds coming and going.
Remember, these things had never been painted like this before.
I think that immediacy, which would be an important claim made later by the French Impressionists,
but that immediacy of vision, almost a photographic process,
is what makes this painting so absolutely striking to us even today.
It was this immediacy of vision seen in all the Pre-Raphaelite landscape paintings,
in the colours, the truth to nature,
that made their work admired at home and abroad.
The Pre-Raphaelites had engaged with the scientific thinking of the age,
taken advantage of the expanding railroads to visit new pastures,
and, in the process, revolutionised landscape painting with the eye of a camera.
They were all still only in their '20s, but had propelled British art in a new direction.