|
|
|
19th century (1800-1899) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood |
|
|
James Collinson
William Holman Hunt
Dante Gabriel
Rossetti
John Everett Millais
Ford Madox Brown
Edward Burne-Jones
Thomas Cooper Gotch
Arthur Hughes
John William Waterhouse
William Morris
|
|
|
|
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
group of young British painters who banded together in 1848 in
reaction against what they conceived to be the unimaginative and
artificial historical painting of the Royal Academy and who
purportedly sought to express a newmoral seriousness and sincerity
in their works. They were inspired by Italian art of the 14th and
15th centuries, and their adoption of the name Pre-Raphaelite
expressed their admiration for what they saw as the direct and
uncomplicated depiction of nature typical of Italian painting before
the High Renaissance and, particularly, before the time of Raphael.
Although the Brotherhood's active life lasted not quite five years,
its influence on painting in Britain, and ultimately on the
decorative arts and interior design, was profound.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848 by three Royal
Academy students: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was a gifted poet as
well as a painter, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais,
all under 25 years of age. The painter James Collinson, the painter
and critic F.G. Stephens, the sculptor Thomas Woolner, and thecritic William
Michael Rossetti (Dante Gabriel's brother) joined them by
invitation. The painters William Dyce andFord Madox Brown, who acted
in part as mentors to the younger men, came to adapt their own work
to the Pre-Raphaelite style.
The Brotherhood immediately began to produce highly convincing
and significant works. Their pictures of religious and medieval
subjects strove to revive the deep religious feeling and naive,
unadorned directness of 15th-century Florentine and Sienese
painting. The style that Hunt and Millais evolved featured sharp and
brilliant lighting, a clear atmosphere, and a near-photographic
reproduction of minute details. They also frequently introduced a
private poetic symbolism into their representations of biblical
subjects and medieval literary themes. Rossetti's work differed from
that of the others in its more arcane aesthetic and in the artist's
general lack of interest in copying the precise appearance of
objects in nature. Vitality and freshness of vision are the most
admirable qualities of the seearly Pre-Raphaelite paintings.
Some of the founding members exhibited their first works
anonymously, signing their paintings with the monogramPRB. When
their identity and youth were discovered in 1850, their work was
harshly criticized by the novelist Charles Dickens, among others,
not only for its disregard of academic ideals of beauty but also for
its apparent irreverence in treating religious themes with an
uncompromising realism. Nevertheless, the leading art critic of the
day, John Ruskin, stoutly defended Pre-Raphaelite art, and the
members of the group were never without patrons.
By 1854 the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had gone
their individual ways, but their style had a wide influence and
gained many followers during the 1850s and early '60s. In the late
1850s Dante Gabriel Rossettibecame associated with the younger
painters Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris and moved closer to a
sensual and almost mystical romanticism. Millais, the most
technically gifted painter of the group, went on to become an
academic success. Hunt alone pursued the same style throughout most
of his career and remained true to Pre-Raphaelite principles.
Pre-Raphaelitism in its later stage is epitomized by the paintings
of Burne-Jones, characterized by a jewel-toned palette, elegantly
attenuated figures, and highlyimaginative subjects and settings.
Encyclopædia Britannica |
|
|
|
The Pre-Raphaelites
Between 1825 and 1860, life in England underwent profound changes
as a result of the Industrial Revolution. In a country soon to be
transformed by coal and steel production and its peripheral side
effects of poverty and pollution, the luminous, sharply focused
paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites provided a form of escape. The
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848 by William Holman
Hunt (1827-1910), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), andJohn Everett
Millais (1829-96). They were later joined by others, including Ford
Madox Brown (1821-93) andEdward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-98). They
initially signed their works with the initials PRB, causing much
controversy and scandal. The champion of the movement, however, was
writer and critic John Ruskin (1819-1900). who. in addition to
promoting the Gothic style, helped to reinforce the group's sense of
moral commitment and social awareness. He envisaged art as a means
of saving the human race and fulfilling the most important human
aspirations. In contrast to the pretence and artifice of academic
painting, Pre-Raphaelite art looked afresh at techniques used by
artists before the time of Raphael. Studying nature in detail to
rediscover its inner meaning, the Brotherhood sought to communicate
with the forgotten sources of spirituality. However, the early
purity of spirit was later lost. |
|
|

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Proserpine (Jane
Morris)
1874 |
|
Jane Burden
Jane Burden (October 19, 1839 – January 1914) was
the embodiment of the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of
beauty. She became the wife of William Morris and
the inspiration, and possibly mistress, of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti.She was born in Oxford. At the time
of her birth, her father Robert Burden was a
stableman and lived with his wife (Jane's mother),
Ann Burden (formerly Maizey) at St. Helen's
Passages, St. Peter in the East, Oxford. Jane's
mother, who was illiterate, probably came to Oxford
as a domestic servant. Little is known about Jane's
childhood but it was clearly one of poverty and
deprivation.In October 1857, Jane and her sister
Elizabeth (known in the family as Bessie)
were attending a performance in Oxford of the Drury
Lane Theatre Company. Jane was noticed by the
artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward
Burne-Jones who were part of a group of artists
painting murals in the Oxford Union based on
Arthurian tales. Struck by Jane's beauty, they
sought her to model for them. Jane initially sat
mainly for Rossetti who needed a model for Queen
Guinivere. After this, Jane sat to Morris who was
working on an easel painting, La Belle Iseult(Tate
Gallery).
During this period, Morris fell in love with Jane
and they were engaged.Jane's education was extremely
limited and she was probably intended to go into
domestic service. After her engagement, Jane was
privately educated. Her keen intelligence allowed
her essentially to re-create herself. She was a
voracious reader and became proficient in French and
later Italian. She also became an accomplished
pianist with a strong background in classical music.
Her manners and speech became refined to an extent
that contemporaries referred to her as "Queenly."
Later in life, she would have no trouble moving in
upper classcircles and she appears to have been the
model for Mrs Higgins in Bernard Shaw's
play Pygmalion (1914).
She married William Morris at St. Michael's Church,
Oxford, on April 26, 1859. Her father was at that
time described as a groom, in stables at 65 Holywell
Street, Oxford.
Jane Burden and William Morris lived firstly at the
Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent. While at there, they
had two daughters, Jane Alice (Jenny) born January
1861 and Mary (May) (March 1862 – 1938), who was the
editor of her father's works. They then lived for
many years at Kelmscott Manor, on the Oxfordshire-Wiltshire
borders, which is now open to the public. Jane
became closely attached to Rossetti and may,
inaddition to being his muse, have been his lover.
In 1884, Jane met the poet and political activist
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt at a houseparty given by her
close friend Rosalind Howard (later Countess of
Carlisle). There appears to have been an immediate attractionbetween
the two. By 1887 at the latest, the pair had become
lovers. Their sexual relationship would continue
until 1894 and they remained close friends until
Jane's death.
Jane Morris was an ardent supporter of
Irish Home Rule.
William Morris died on 3 October 1896 at Kelmscott
House, Hammersmith, London. Jane died on 26 January
1914 while staying at 5 Brock Street, Bath.
From
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
|
|
|
|
|
|

Elizabeth Siddal

Elizabeth Siddal
Self-portrait
1854

Elizabeth Siddal
Self-portrait |
|
Elizabeth Siddal
Elizabeth Siddal (July 25, 1829 – February 11, 1862)
was a British artist's model, poet and artist who
was painted and drawn extensively by artists of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Siddal was perhaps the most important model to sit
for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Their ideas
about feminine beauty were profoundly influenced by
her, or rather she personified those ideals. She was
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's model par excellence;
almost all of his early paintings of women are
portraits of her. She was also painted by Walter
Deverell, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett
Millais, and was the model for Millais' well
known Ophelia (1852)
Model for the Pre-Raphaelites
Siddal, whose name was originally spelt 'Siddall'
(it was Rossetti who dropped the second 'l') was
first noticed by Deverell, while she was working as
a milliner. Neither she nor her family had any
artistic aspirations or interests. She was employed
as a model by Deverell and through him was
introduced to the Pre-Raphaelites. The nineteen year
old with her tall thin frame and copper hair was the
first of the Pre-Raphaelite stunners.
While posing for Millais' Ophelia (1852), Siddal had
floated in a bathtub full of water to model the
drowning Ophelia. Millais painted daily into the
winter with Siddal modeling. He put lamps under the
tub to warm the water. On one occasion the lamps
went out and the water slowly became icy cold.
Millais was absorbed by his painting and did not
notice. Siddal did not complain. After this session
she became very sick with a fever, and never fully
recovered. Her father held Millais responsible, and
forced him to pay compensation. It was long thought
that she suffered from tuberculosis, but some
historians now believe that an intestinal disorder
was more likely. Others attribute her poor health to
an addiction to laudenum. Whatever the case, Siddal
never fully recovered and suffered from poor health
from then on.
Elizabeth Siddal was the primary muse for Dante
Gabriel Rossetti throughout most of his youth. After
he met her he began to paint her and almost only her
and stopped her from modelling for the other
Pre-Raphaelites. These drawings and paintings
culminated in Beata Beatrix, painted in 1863, one
year after Elizabeth's death. She was used as a
model for this painting which shows a praying
Beatrice (from Dante Alighieri).
Life with Rossetti
After becoming engaged to Rossetti, Siddal began to
study with him. In contrast to Rossetti's idealized
paintings, Siddal's were harsh. This is very evident
in her self portrait, pictured above. Rossetti
painted and repainted her and drew countless
sketches of her. His depictions show a beauty. Her
self portrait shows much about the subject, but
certainly not the floating beauty that Rossetti
painted. This painting is historically very
significant because it shows, through her own eyes,
a beauty who was idealized by so many famous
artists. In 1855 the art critic John Ruskin began to
subsidize her career. Ruskin paid a generous yearly
stipend in exchange for all drawings and paintings
that she produced. Siddal produced many sketches but
only a single painting. Her sketches are laid out in
a fashion similar to Pre-Rapaelite compositions and
tend to illustrate Arthurian legend and other
idealized Medieval themes. Ruskin also admonished
Rossetti in his letters for not marrying Siddal and
giving her the security she needed. During this
period Siddal also began to write poetry.
As Siddal came from a lower class family, Rossetti
feared introducing her to his parents. "Lizzy" was
also the victim of harsh criticism from Rossetti's
sisters. The knowledge that the family would not
approve the wedding contributed to Rossetti putting
it off. Siddal also appears to have believed, with
some justification, that Rossetti was always seeking
to replace her with a younger muse, which
contributed to her later depressive periods and
illness.
Ill-health and death
Siddal travelled to Paris and Nice for several years
for her health. She returned to England in 1860 to
marry Rossetti. In the previous ten years he had
been engaged to her and then broken it off at the
last minute several times. Stress from those
incidents had affected her. She was now severely
depressed and her long illness had given her access
to and addiction to laudanum. In 1861, Siddal became
pregnant. She was overjoyed about this, but the
pregnancy ended in a stillborn daughter. Siddal
overdosed on laudanum shortly after becoming
pregnant for a second time. Rossetti discovered the
body. Although her death was ruled accidental by the
coroner, there are suggestions that Rossetti found a
suicide note. Consumed with grief and guilt Rossetti
went to the see Holman Hunt who is supposed to have
instructed him to burn the note – under the law at
the time suicide was both illegal and immoral and
would have brought a scandal on the family as well
as barred Siddal from a Christian burial.
Death, however, was not her last adventure. Overcome
with grief, Rossetti enclosed in Elizabeth's coffin
a small journal containing the only copies he had of
his many poems. He slid the book into Elizabeth's
flowing red hair. In 1869, Rossetti was chronically
addicted to drugs and alcohol. He convinced himself
that he was going blind and couldn't paint. He began
to write poetry again. Before publishing his newer
poems he became obsessed with retrieving the poems
he had slipped into Elizabeth's hair. Rossetti and
his agent, the notorious Charles Augustus Howell,
applied to the Home Secretary for an order to have
her coffin exhumed to retrieve the manuscript. This
was done in the dead of night so as to avoid public
curiosity and attention, and Rossetti was not
present. Howell, a notorious liar, reported to
Rossetti that her corpse was remarkably well
preserved and her delicate beauty intact. Her hair
was said to have continued to grow after death so
that the Coffin was filled with her coppery hair.
The manuscript was retrieved although a worm had
burrowed through the book so that it was difficult
to read some of the poems.
Rossetti published the old poems with his newer
ones; they were not well received by some critics
because of their eroticism, and he was haunted by
the exhumation through the rest of his life.
Rossetti's relationship with Siddal is also explored
by Christina Rossetti in her poem "In an Artist's
Studio".
From
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
|
|
|
|
|

Charles Lock Eastlake
The Champion
1824 |
|
|

Charles Lock Eastlake
Classical landscape |
|
|

Charles
Lock Eastlake
Christ
Blessing Little Children |
|
|

Charles Lock
Eastlake
Napoleon Bonaparte |
|
|

Charles Lock Eastlake
Foro di Traiano e Campidoglio |
|
|

Charles Lock Eastlake
Il Foro di Traiano |
|
|

Charles
Lock Eastlake
Hagar and Ishmael |
|
|

Charles Lock Eastlake
The Colosseum from the
Esquiline
1822 |
|
|

Charles Lock Eastlake
The Colosseum from the
Campo Vaccino
1822 |
|
|

Charles Lock Eastlake
Greek Girl
1827 |
|
|

Charles Lock Eastlake
Lord Byron's "Dream"
1827 |
|
|

Charles Lock Eastlake
Mrs Charles H. Bellenden
Ker
1835 |
|
|

Charles Lock Eastlake
Christ Lamenting over Jerusalem
1846 |
|
|

Charles Lock Eastlake
The Escape of Francesco
Novello di Carrara, with his Wife, from the Duke of
Milan
1850 |
|
|
|
John Ruskin
born February 8, 1819, London, England
died January 20, 1900, Coniston,Lancashire
English critic of art, architecture, and society who was a gifted
painter, a distinctive prose stylist, and an important example of
the Victorian Sage, or Prophet: a writer of polemical prose who
seeks to cause widespread cultural and social change.
Early life and influences
Ruskin was born into the commercial classes of the prosperous and
powerful Britain of the years immediately following the Napoleonic
Wars. His father, John James Ruskin, was a Scots wine merchant who
had moved to London and made a fortune in the sherry trade. John
Ruskin, an only child, was largely educated at home, where he was
given a taste for art by his father's collecting of contemporary
watercolours and a minute and comprehensive knowledge of the Bible
by his piously Protestant mother.
This combination of the religious intensity of the Evangelical
Revival and the artistic excitement of English Romantic painting
laid the foundations of Ruskin's later views. In his formative
years, painters such as J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, and John Sell
Cotman were at the peak of their careers. At the same time religious
writers and preachers such as Charles Simeon, John Keble, Thomas
Arnold, and John Henry Newman were establishing the spiritual and
ethical preoccupations that would characterize the reign of Queen
Victoria. Ruskin's family background in the world of businesswas
significant, too: it not only provided the means for his extensive
travels to see paintings, buildings, and landscapesin Britain and
continental Europe but also gave him an understanding of the newly
rich, middle-class audience for which his books would be written.
Ruskin discovered the work of Turner through the illustrations to
an edition of Samuel Rogers's poem Italy given him by a business
partner of his father in 1833. By the mid-1830s he was publishing
short pieces in both prose and verse in magazines, and in 1836 he
was provoked into drafting a reply (unpublished) to an attack on
Turner's painting by the art critic of Blackwood's Magazine. After
five years at the University of Oxford, during which he won the
Newdigate Prize for poetry but was prevented by ill health from
sitting for an honours degree, Ruskin returned, in 1842, to his
abandoned project of defending and explaining the late work of
Turner.
Art criticism
In 1843 Ruskin published the first volume of Modern Painters, a
book that would eventually consist of five volumes and occupy him
for the next 17 years. His first purpose was to insist on the
“truth” of the depiction of Nature in Turner's landscape paintings.
Neoclassical critics had attacked the later work of Turner, with its
proto-Impressionist concern for effects of light and atmosphere, for
mimetic inaccuracy, and for a failure to represent the “general
truth” that had been an essential criterion of painting in the age
of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Drawing on his serious amateur interests in
geology, botany, and meteorology, Ruskin made it his business to
demonstrate in detail that Turner's work was everywhere based on a
profound knowledge of the local and particular truths of natural
form. One after another, Turner's “truth of tone,” “truth of colour,”
“truth of space,” “truth of skies,” “truth of earth,” “truth of
water,” and “truth of vegetation” were minutely considered, in a
laborious project that would not be completed until the appearance
of the fifth and final volume of Modern Painters in 1860.
This shift of concern from general to particular conceptions of
truth was a key feature of Romantic thought, and Ruskin's first
major achievement was thus to bring the assumptions of Romanticism
to the practice of art criticism. By 1843 avant-garde painters had
been working in this new spirit for several decades, but criticism
and public understanding had lagged behind. More decisively than any
previous writer, Ruskin brought 19th-century English painting and
19th-century English art criticism into sympathetic alignment. As he
did so, he alerted readers to the fact that they had, in Turner, one
of the greatest painters in the history of Western art alive and
working among them in contemporary London, and, in the broader
school of English landscape painting, a major modern art movement.
Ruskin did this in a prose style peculiarly well adapted to the
discussion of the visual arts in an era when there was limited
reproductive illustration and no easy access to well-stocked public
art galleries. In these circumstances the critic was obliged to
create in words an effective sensory and emotional substitute for
visual experience. Working in the tradition of the Romantic poetic
prose of Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey, though more immediately
influenced by the descriptive writing of Sir Walter Scott, the
rhetoric of the Bible, and the blank verse of William Wordsworth,
Ruskin vividly evoked the effect on the human eye and sensibility
both of Turner's paintings and of the actual landscapes that Turner
and other artists had sought to represent.
In the process Ruskin introduced the newly wealthy commercial and
professional classes of the English-speaking world to the
possibility of enjoying and collecting art. Since most of them had
been shaped by an austerely puritanical religious tradition, Ruskin
knew that they would be suspicious of claims for painting that
stressed its sensual or hedonic qualities. Instead, he defined
painting as “a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the
vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.” What that language
expressed, in Romantic landscape painting, was a Wordsworthian sense
of a divine presence in Nature: a morally instructive natural
theology in which God spoke through physical “types.” Conscious of
the spiritual significance of the natural world, young painters
should “go to Nature in all singleness of heart…having no other
thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her
instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning
nothing.”
Three years later, in the second volume of Modern Painters
(1846), Ruskin would specifically distinguish this strenuously
ethical or Theoretic conception of art from the Aesthetic, un
didactic, or art-for-art's-sake definition that would be its great
rival in the second half of the 19th century. Despite his
friendships with individual Aesthetes, Ruskin would remain the
dominant spokesman for a morally and socially committed conception
of art throughout his lifetime.
Art, architecture, and society
After the publication of the first volume of Modern Painters in
1843, Ruskin became aware of another avant-garde artistic movement:
the critical rediscovery of the painting of the Gothic Middle Ages.
He wrote about these Idealist painters (especially Giotto, Fra
Angelico, and Benozzo Gozzoli) at the end of the second volume of
Modern Painters,and he belatedly added an account of them to the
third edition of the first volume in 1846. These medieval religious
artists could provide, he believed, in a way in which the Dutch,
French, and Italian painters of the 17th and 18th centuries could
not, an inspiring model for the art of the “modern” age.
This medievalist enthusiasm was one reason that Ruskin was so
ready to lend his support to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), a
group of young English artists formed in 1848 to reject the
Neoclassical assumptions of contemporary art schools. Ruskin
published an enthusiastic pamphlet about the PRB (in which he
misleadingly identified them as the natural heirs of Turner) in
1851, wrote letters to the Times in 1851 and 1854 to defend them
from their critics, and recommended their work in his Edinburgh
Lectures of 1853 (published 1854).
But medievalism was even more important in the field of
architecture, where the Gothic Revival was as direct an expression
of the new Romantic spirit as the landscape painting of Turner or
Constable. Ruskin had been involved in a major Gothic Revival
building project in 1844, when George Gilbert Scott redesigned
Ruskin's parents' parish church, St. Giles's Camberwell. In 1848,
newly married to Euphemia (Effie) Gray, Ruskin went on a honeymoon
tour of the Gothic churches of northern France and began to write
his first major book on buildings, The Seven Lamps of Architecture
(1849). Conceived in the disturbing context of the European
revolutions of 1848, the book lays down seven moral principles (or
“Lamps”) to guide architectural practice, one of which, “The Lamp of
Memory,” articulates the scrupulous respect for the original fabric
of old buildings that would inspire William Morris and, through him,
the conservation movement of the 20th century. In November Ruskin
went abroad again, this time to Venice to research a more
substantial book on architecture.
The Stones of Venice was published in three volumes, one in 1851
and two more in 1853. In part it is a laboriously researched history
of Venetian architecture, based on long months of direct study of
the original buildings, then in a condition of serious neglect and
decay. But it is also a book of moral and social polemic with the
imaginative structure of a Miltonic or Words worthian sublime epic.
Ruskin's narrative charts the fall of Venice from its medieval Eden,
through the impiety and arrogance (as Ruskin saw it) of the
Renaissance,to its modern condition of political impotence and
social frivolity. As such, the book is a distinguished late example
of the political medievalism found in the work of William Cobbett,
Robert Southey, Thomas Carlyle, and the Young England movement of
the 1840s. Ruskin differs from these predecessors both in the poetic
power of his prose and in his distinctive—and widely
influential—insistence that art and architecture are, necessarily,
the direct expression of the social conditions in which they were
produced. Here, as elsewhere, the Aesthetic movement, with its view
of art as a rebellious alternative to the social norm and its
enthusiasm for Renaissance texts and artifacts, stands in direct
contrast to Ruskin's Theoretic views.
The Stones of Venice was influential in other ways as well.
Itscelebration of Italian Gothic encouraged the use of foreign
models in English Gothic Revival architecture. By 1874 Ruskin would
regret the extent to which architects had “dignified our banks and
drapers' shops with Venetian tracery.” But, for good or ill, his
writing played a key part in establishing the view that the
architectural style of Venice, the great maritime trading nation of
the medieval world, wasparticularly appropriate for buildings in
modern Britain. The other enduring influence derived, more subtly,
from a single chapter in the second volume, “The Nature of Gothic.”
There Ruskin identified “imperfection” as an essential feature of
Gothic art, contrasting it with the mechanical regularity of
Neoclassical buildings and modern mass production. Gothic
architecture, he believed, allowed a significant degree of creative
freedom and artistic fulfillment to the individual workman. We could
not, and should not, take pleasure in an object that had not itself
been made with pleasure. In this proposition lay the roots both of
Ruskin's own quarrel with industrial capitalism and of the Arts and
Crafts movement of the later 19th century.
Cultural criticism
Turner died in 1851. Ruskin's marriage was dissolved, on grounds
of nonconsummation, in 1854, leaving the former Effie Gray free to
marry the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. Ruskin
withdrew somewhat from society. He traveled extensively in Europe
and, from 1856 to 1858, took on a considerable body of
administrative work as the chief artistic executor of Turner's
estate. He contributed both financially and physically to the
construction of a major Gothic Revival building: Benjamin Woodward's
Oxford University Museum. In 1856 he published the third and fourth
volumes of Modern Painters, with their penetrating inquiry into the
reasons for the predominance of landscape painting in 19th-century
art and their invention of the important critical term “pathetic
fallacy.” His annual Academy Notes (a series of pamphlets issued by
an English publisher from 1855 to 1859) sustained his reputation as
a persuasive commentator on contemporary painting. But by 1858
Ruskin was beginning to move on from the specialist criticism of art
and architecture to a wider concern with the cultural condition of
his age. His growing friendship with the historian and essayist
Thomas Carlyle contributed to this process. Like Carlyle, Ruskin
began to adopt the “prophetic” stance, familiar from the Bible, of a
voice crying from the wilderness and seeking to call a lapsed people
back into the paths of righteousness.
This marginal role as a disenchanted outsider both legitimized
and, to an extent, required a ferocity and oddness that would be
conspicuous features of Ruskin's later career. In 1858 Ruskin
lectured on “The Work of Iron in Nature, Art and Policy” (published
in The Two Paths, 1859), a text in which both the
radical-conservative temper and the symbolic method of his later
cultural criticism are clearly established. Beginning as an art
critic, Ruskin contrasts the exquisite sculptured iron grilles of
medieval Verona with the mass-produced metal security railings with
which modern citizens protect their houses. The artistic contrast
is, of course, also a social contrast, and Ruskin goes rapidly
beyond this to a symbolic assertion of the “iron” values involved in
his definition of the just society. By wearing the fetters of a
benignly neofeudalist social order, men and women, Ruskin believed,
might lead lives of greater aesthetic fulfillment, in an environment
less degraded by industrial pollution.
These values are persistently restated in Ruskin's writings of
the 1860s, sometimes in surprising ways. Unto This Last and Munera
Pulveris (1862 and 1872 as books, though published in magazines in
1860 and 1862–63) are attacks on the classical economics of Adam
Smith and John Stuart Mill. Neither book makes any significant
technical contribution to the study of economics (though Ruskin
thought otherwise); both memorably express Ruskin's moral outrage at
the extent to which the materialist and utilitarian ethical
assumptions implicit in this new technique for understandinghuman
behaviour had come to be accepted as normative. Sesame and Lilies
(1865) would become notorious in the late20th century as a stock
example of Victorian male chauvinism. In fact, Ruskin was using the
conventional construction of the feminine, as pacific, altruistic,
and uncompetitive, to articulate yet another symbolic assertion of
his anticapitalist social model. The Crown of Wild Olive (1866,
enlarged in 1873) collects some of the best specimens of Ruskin's
Carlylean manner, notably the lecture “Traffic” of 1864, which
memorably draws its audience's attention to the hypocrisy manifested
by their choice of Gothic architecture for their churches but
Neoclassical designs for their homes.
The dogmatic Protestantism of Ruskin's childhood had been
partially abandoned in 1858, after an “unconversion” experience in
Turin. Ten years later, in a moving lecture on “The Mystery of Life
and Its Arts,” Ruskin reflected on his returning sense of the
spiritual and transcendent. In The Queen of the Air (1869) he
attempted to express his old concept of a divine power in Nature in
new terms calculated for an age in which assent to the Christian
faith was no longer automatic or universal. Through an account of
the Greek myth of Athena, Ruskin sought to suggest an enduring human
need for—and implicit recognition of—the supernatural authority on
which the moral stresses of his artistic, political, and cultural
views depend.
His father's death in 1864 had left Ruskin a wealthy man. He used
his wealth, in part, to promote idealistic social causes, notably
the Guild of St. George, a pastoral community first planned in 1871
and formally constituted seven years later. From 1866 to 1875 he was
unhappily in love with a woman 30years his junior, Rose La Touche,
whose physical and mental deterioration caused him acute distress.
During these years he began, himself, to show signs of serious
psychological illness. In 1871 he bought Brantwood, a house in the
English Lake District (now a museum of his work) and lived there for
the rest of his life.
Ruskin's appointment as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in
1870 was a welcome encouragement at a troubled stage of his career,
and in the following year he launched Fors Clavigera, a one-man
monthly magazine in which, from 1871 to 1878 and 1880 to 1884 he
developed his idiosyncratic cultural theories. Like his successive
series of Oxford lectures (1870–79 and 1883–84), Fors is an
unpredictable mixture of striking insights, powerful rhetoric,
self-indulgence, bigotry, and occasional incoherence. As a
by-product of the Fors project, however, Ruskin wrote his lastmajor
work: his autobiography, Praeterita (1885–89). Unfinished,
shamelessly partial (it omits, for example, all mention of his
marriage), and chronologically untrustworthy, it provides a subtle
and memorable history of the growth of Ruskin's distinctive
sensibility.
Assessment
In November 1878 the painter James McNeill Whistler's action for
libel against Ruskin—brought after Ruskin's attack on the
impressionist manner of a Whistler Nocturne—came totrial. The trial
made the conflict between Ruskin's moral viewof art and Whistler's
Aestheticism a matter of wide public interest. Whistler, awarded
only a farthing's damages and no costs, was driven into bankruptcy.
Ruskin suffered no financial ill effects, but his reputation as an
art critic was seriously harmed. After this date there was a growing
tendency to see him as an enemy of modern art: blinkered, eccentric,
and out-of-date.
Modernist artists and critics rejected Ruskin. His stress on the
moral, social, and spiritual purposes of art and his Naturalist
theory of visual representation were unpopular in the era of
Impressionism, Cubism, and Dada. Gothic Revival buildings became
deeply unfashionable; the architecture critic Geoffrey Scott, in
1914, would dismiss Ruskin's architectural theory as “The Ethical
Fallacy.”
Since then, Ruskin has gradually been rediscovered. His formative
importance as a thinker about ecology, about the conservation of
buildings and environments, about Romanticpainting, about art
education, and about the human cost of the mechanization of work
became steadily more obvious. The outstanding quality of his own
drawings and watercolours (modestly treated in his lifetime as
working notes or amateur sketches) was increasingly acknowledged, as
was his role as a stimulus to the flowering of British painting,
architecture, and decorative art in the second half of the 19th
century.
Above all, Ruskin was rediscovered as a great writer of English
prose. Frequently self-contradictory, hectoringly moralistic, and
insufficiently informed, Ruskin was nonetheless gifted with
exceptional powers of perception and expression. These are the gifts
that the poet Matthew Arnold acknowledged when he spoke of “the
genius, the feeling, the temperament” of the descriptive writing in
the fourth volume of Modern Painters. This unusual capacity to see
things and to say what he saw makes Ruskin's work not just an
important episode in the history of taste but also an enduring and
distinctive part of English literature.
Nicholas Shrimpton
Encyclopædia Britannica |
|
|

John Ruskin
Portrait of Rose la Touche |
|
|

John Ruskin
The garden of San Miniato
1845 |
|
|

John Ruskin
Tower of the Cathedral at Sens |
|
|

John Ruskin
The Pulpit in the Church of S. Ambrogio |
|
|

John Ruskin
Study of the Rocks and Ferns, Crossmouth |
|
|

John Ruskin
Head of Lake Geneva |
|
|
|
Mary Macomber
born August 21, 1861, Fall River,Massachusetts, U.S.
died February 4, 1916, Boston
American artist remembered for her highly symbolic, dreamlike
paintings.
Macomber studied drawing with a local artist from about 1880 to
1883, then at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for a
year, until ill health cut short her studies. After her recovery she
studied briefly with Frank Duveneck and then opened a studio in
Boston. In 1889 her painting Ruth was exhibited in the National
Academy of Design show in New York City. Over the next 13 years she
exhibited 25 more paintings at the National Academy and was a
frequent exhibitor at other major museums and galleries.
Macomber's symbolic, allegorical, and decorative panels,
revealing the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, were widely admired
by her contemporaries. Among her more celebrated works are Love
Awakening Memory (1892), Love's Lament (1893), St. Catherine (1897),
The Hour Glass (1900), The LaceJabot (1900; a self-portrait), Night
and Her Daughter Sleep (1903), and Memory Comforting Sorrow (1905).
In the later years of her career she also devoted much time to
portraiture.
Encyclopædia Britannica |
|
|

Macomber
Night and Sleep |
|
|
|
Arts and Crafts Movement
English aesthetic movement of the second half of the 19th century
that represented the beginning of a new appreciation of the
decorative arts throughout Europe. By 1860 a few people had become
profoundly disturbed by the level to which style, craftsmanship, and
public taste had sunk in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and
its mass-produced and banal decorative arts. Among them was
the English reformer, poet, and designer William Morris, who, in
1861, founded a firm of interior decorators and manufacturers
dedicated to recapturing the spirit and quality of medieval
craftsmanship. Morris and his associates (among them the architect
Philip Webb and the painters Ford Madox Brown and Edward
Burne-Jones) produced handcrafted metalwork, jewelry, wallpaper,
textiles, furniture, and books. To this date many of their designs
are copied by designers and furniture manufacturers.
By the 1880s Morris' efforts had widened the appeal of the Arts and
Crafts Movement to a new generation. In 1882 the English architect
and designer Arthur H. Mackmurdo helped organize the Century Guild
for craftsmen, one of several such groups established about this
time. These men revived the art of hand printing and championed the
idea that there was no meaning fuldifference between the fine and
decorative arts. Many converts, both from professional artists'
ranks and from among the intellectual class as a whole, helped
spread the ideas of the movement.
The main controversy raised by the movement—as no one ever denied
the quality or aesthetic appeal of the work produced—was its
practicality in the modern world. The progressives claimed that the
movement was trying to turn back the clock and that it could not be
done, that the Arts and Crafts Movement could not be taken as
practical in mass urban and industrialized society. On the other
hand, a reviewer who criticized an 1893 exhibition as “the work of a
few for the few” also realized that it represented a graphic protest
against design as “a marketable affair, controlled by the salesmen
and the advertiser, and at the mercy of every passing fashion.”
In the 1890s approval of the Arts and Crafts Movement widened, and
the movement became diffused and less specifically identified with a
small group of people. Its ideas spread to other countries and
became identified with the growing international interest in design,
specifically with Art Nouveau.
|
|
|
|
William Morris
born March 24, 1834, Walthamstow, near London
died Oct. 3, 1896, Hammersmith, near London
English designer, craftsman, poet, and early Socialist, whose
designs for furniture, fabrics, stained glass, wallpaper, and other
decorative products generated the Arts and Crafts Movement in
England and revolutionized Victorian taste.
Education and early career.
Morris was born in an Essex village on the southern edge of
Epping Forest, a member of a large and well-to-do family. From his
preparatory school, he went at the age of 13 to Marlborough College.
A schoolfellow describes him at this time as “a thick-set,
strong-looking boy, with a high colour and black curly hair,
good-natured and kind, but with a fearfultemper.” At Marlborough,
Morris said that he learned “next to nothing . . . for indeed next
to nothing was taught.” As in later life, he learned only what he
wanted to learn.
In 1853 Morris went to Exeter College at Oxford, where he met
Edward Jones (later the painter and designer Burne-Jones), who was
to become his lifelong friend. Both Morris and Jones became deeply
affected by the High Church (Anglo-Catholic) movement of the Church
of England, and it was assumed that they would become clergymen.
Nevertheless, it was the writings of John Ruskin on the social and
moral basis of architecture (particularly the chapter “On the Nature
of Gothic” in The Stones of Venice) that came to Morris “with the
force of a revelation.” After taking his degree in 1856, he entered
the Oxford office of the Gothic Revivalist architect G.E. Street. In
the same year he financed the first 12 monthly issues of The Oxford
and Cambridge Magazine, where many of those poems appeared that, two
years later, were reprinted in his remarkable first published work,
The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems.
Visits with Street and Burne-Jones to Belgium and northern
France, where he first saw the 15th-century paintings of Hans
Memling and the Van Eyck brothers and the cathedrals of Amiens,
Chartres, and Rouen, confirmed Morris in his love of medieval art.
It was at this time that he came under the powerful influence of the
Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who
persuaded him to give up architecture for painting and enrolled him
among the band of friends who were decorating the walls of the
Oxford Union with scenes from Arthurian legend based on Le Morte
Darthur by the 15th-centuryEnglish writer Sir Thomas Malory. Only
one easel painting by Morris survives: “La Belle Iseult,” or “Queen
Guenevere” (Tate Gallery, London). His model was Jane Burden, the
beautiful, enigmatic daughter of an Oxford groom. He married her in
1859, but the marriage was to prove a source of unhappiness to both.
Morris appears at this time, in the memoirs of the painter Val
Prinsep, as “a short square man with spectacles and a vast mop of
dark hair.” It was observed “how decisive he was: how accurate,
without any effort or formality: what an extraordinary power of
observation lay at the base of many of his casual or incidental
remarks.” From 1856 to 1859 Morris shared a studio with Burne-Jones
in Red Lion Square, London, for which he designed, according to
Rossetti, “some intensely medieval furniture.”
After his marriage, Morris commissioned his friend the architect
Philip Webb, whom he had originally met in Street's office, to build
the Red House at Bexleyheath (so called because it was built of red
brick when the fashion was for stucco villas). It was during the
furnishing and decorating of this house by Morris and his friends
that the idea came to them of founding an association of “fine art
workmen,” whichin April 1861 became the firm of Morris, Marshall,
Faulkner & Company with premises in Red Lion Square. The other
members of the firm were Ford Madox Brown, D.G. Rossetti, Webb, and
Burne-Jones. At the International Exhibition of 1862 at South
Kensington they exhibited stained glass, furniture, and
embroideries. This led to commissions to decorate the new churches
then being built by G.F. Bodley, notably St. Martin's-on-the-Hill at
Scarborough. The apogee of the firm's decorative work is the
magnificent series of stained-glass windows designed during the next
decade by Burne-Jones for Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge, the roof
being painted by Morris and Webb. The designs for these windows came
to Morris uncoloured, and it was he who chose the colours and put in
the lead lines. He also designed many other windows himself, for
both domestic and ecclesiastical use.
Two daughters, Jenny and May, were born in 1861 and 1862, and
altogether the five years spent at Red House were the happiest of
Morris' life. After a serious attack of rheumatic fever, brought on
by overwork, he moved in 1865 to Bloomsbury in London. The greater
part of his new house wasgiven over to the firm's workshops—an
arrangement that, combined with her husband's boisterous manners and
Rossetti's infatuation with her, reduced Jane to a state of neurotic
invalidism. Morris' first wallpaper designs, “Trellis,” “Daisy,” and
“Fruit,” or “Pomegranate,” belong to 1862–64; he did not arrive at
his mature style until 10 years later, with the “Jasmine” and
“Marigold” papers.
Iceland and Socialism.
As a poet, he first achieved fame and success with the romantic
narrative The Life and Death of Jason (1867). In the 20th century,
however, Jason, with its lax, easily flowing couplets, appears
diffuse to the point of tenuity. All painful emotion is carefully
avoided or smothered in prettiness, as italso is in his next work,
in the seemingly endless stories of The Earthly Paradise (1868–70),
a series of narrative poems based on classical and medieval sources.
The best parts of The Earthly Paradise are the introductory poems on
the months, in which Morris reveals his personal unhappiness. A
sterner spirit informs his principal poetic achievement, the epic
Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876),
written after a prolonged study of the sagas (medieval prose
narratives) read by Morris in the original Old Norse. The
exquisitely illuminated Book of Verse, telling once more of hopeless
love and dedicated to Georgiana Burne-Jones, belongs to 1870.
In 1871 Morris and Rossetti took the Elizabethan manor house of
Kelmscott in Oxfordshire. In the same year Morris paid his first
visit to Iceland, and the journal he kept of his travels contains
some of his most vigorous descriptive writing. He returned to
Iceland in 1873. The joint tenancy of Kelmscott, however, was never
a success, and, after the finalbreakdown of his health in 1874,
Rossetti left the house for good, to Morris' great relief. At the
same time, the firm was reorganized under his sole proprietorship as
Morris & Company. In 1875 Morris began his revolutionary experiments
with vegetable dyes, which, after the removal in 1881 of the firm to
larger premises at Merton Abbey in Surrey, resulted in their finest
printed and woven fabrics, carpets, and tapestries. In 1877 Morris
gave his first public lecture, “The Decorative Arts” (later called
“The Lesser Arts”), and his first collection of lectures, Hopes and
Fears for Art, appeared in 1882. In 1877 he also founded the Society
for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in an attempt to combat the
drastic methods of restoration then being carried out on the
cathedrals and parish churches of Great Britain.
The Morris family moved into Kelmscott House (named after their
country house in Oxfordshire), at Hammersmith, in 1878. Five years
later Morris joined Henry Mayers Hyndman's Democratic (later Social
Democratic) Federation and began his tireless tours of industrial
areas to spread the gospel of Socialism. But he was considerately
treated by the authorities, even when leading a banned demonstration
to London's Trafalgar Square on “Bloody Sunday” (Nov. 13, 1887),
when the police, supported by troops, cleared the square of
demonstrators. On this occasion he marched with the playwright
George Bernard Shaw at his side. But by this time Morris had
quarrelled with the autocratic Hyndman Federation and formed the
Socialist League, with its own publication, The Commonweal, in which
his two finest romances, A Dream of John Ball (1886–87) and News
from Nowhere (1890), an idyllic vision of a Socialist rural utopia,
appeared. Subsequently, he founded the Hammersmith Socialist
Society, which held weekly lectures in the coach house next door to
Kelmscott House as well as open-air meetings in different parts of
London.
The Kelmscott Press.
The Kelmscott Press was started in 1891, with the printer andtype
designer Emery Walker as typographical adviser, and between that
year and 1898 produced 53 titles in 66 volumes. Morris designed
three type styles for his press: Golden type, modelled on that of
Nicolas Jenson, the 15th-century French printer; Troy type, a gothic
font on the model of the early German printers of the 15th century;
and Chaucer type, a smaller variant of Troy, in which The Works of
Geoffrey Chaucer was printed during the last years of his life. One
of the greatest examples of the art of the printed book, Chaucer is
the most highly decorated of the Kelmscott publications. Most of the
Kelmscott books were plain and simple, for Morris observed that
15th-century books were “always beautiful by force of the mere
typography.”
Death and assessment.
A sea voyage to Norway in the summer of 1896 failed to revive
Morris' flagging energies, and he died that autumn after returning
home, worn out by the multiplicity of his activities. He was buried
at Kelmscott beneath a simple gravestone designed by Philip Webb.
Morris is now regarded as one of the great men of the 19th
century, though he turned away from what he called “the dullsqualor
of civilization” to romance, myth, and epic. Followinghis
contemporary the art critic John Ruskin, Morris defined beauty in
art as the result of man's pleasure in his work and asked, “Unless
people care about carrying on their business without making the
world hideous, how can they care about Art?” To Morris, art included
the whole man-made environment.
In his own time William Morris was most widely known as the
author of The Earthly Paradise and for his designs for wallpapers,
textiles, and carpets. Since the mid-20th century it is as a
designer and craftsman, rather than as poet or politician, that
Morris is valued most, though future generations may esteem him more
as a social and moral critic, a pioneer of the society of equality.
Philip Prichard Henderson
Encyclopædia Britannica |
|
|

William Morris
Queen Guenevere
1858
Oil on canvas
Tate Gallery, London |
|
|

William Morris
Guinevere and Iseult: Cartoon for Stained Glass
1862 |
|
|
|
Thomas Woolner
(b Hadleigh, Suffolk, 17 Dec 1825; d London, 7 Oct 1892).
English sculptor and poet. He ranks with John Henry Foley as the
leading sculptor of mid-Victorian England. He trained with William
Behnes and in 1842 enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy,
London. In 1844 he exhibited at Westminster Hall, London, a
life-size plaster group, the Death of Boadicea (destr.), in an
unsuccessful attempt to obtain sculptural commissions for the Houses
of Parliament. His earliest important surviving work is the
statuette of Puck (plaster, 1845–7; C. G. Woolner priv. col.), which
was admired by William Holman Hunt and helped to secure Woolner’s
admission in 1848 to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The work’s
Shakespearean theme and lifelike execution, stressing Puck’s
humorous malice rather than traditional ideal beauty, made it highly
appealing. Although eclipsed by Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, Woolner was an important figure in the
Brotherhood. He contributed poetry to its journal, The Germ (1850),
and his work was committed to truthfulness to nature more
consistently than that of any other Pre-Raphaelite, except for Hunt.
This is evident in Woolner’s monument to William Wordsworth (marble,
1851; St Oswald, Grasmere, Cumbria). This relief portrait, which
conveys both the poet’s physiognomy and his intellect, is flanked by
botanically faithful renditions of flowers, emphasizing Wordsworth’s
doctrine that in Woolner’s words, ‘common things can be made equally
suggestive and instructive with the most exalted subjects’. |
|
|

Thomas Woolner
Puck
1845

Thomas Woolner
Achilles
shouting from the Trenches

Thomas Woolner
Stephen Lushington

Thomas
Woolner
Bust of
Alfred Tennyson |
|
|

Thomas
Woolner
Bust of
Charles Darwin |
|

Thomas Woolner
Bust of Arthur
Hugh Clough

Thomas Woolner
Bust of
Frederick Temple

Thomas Woolner
Reliefs illustrating scenes
from the Iliad, for Gladstone memorial bust 1865-66
|
|
|

Thomas Woolner
Eros and Euphrosyne

Thomas Woolner
Virgilia Bewailing the
Banishment of Coriolanus |
|
|

Thomas Woolner
The Crucifixion
1876 |
|
|
|
|
James Collinson
(b Mansfield, 9 May 1825; d London, 24 Jan 1881).
English painter. He was the son of a Nottinghamshire bookseller.
He studied at the Royal Academy Schools, London, where he was a
fellow student of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt.
Although quiet and unobtrusive, he caught the attention of critics
when he exhibited the Charity Boy’s Début at the Royal Academy in
1847 (sold London, Christie’s, 26 Oct 1979, lot 256). The painting
was praised for its truthfulness and use of minute detail. It was
admired by Rossetti, who sought out Collinson and befriended him.
The following year saw the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood (PRB), which Rossetti invited Collinson to join. Around
this date Collinson renounced Catholicism and became engaged to
Christina Rossetti; possibly this influenced the other members of
the PRB in favour of his election to their number. However, he was
never a leading member of the Brotherhood. |
|
|

James Collinson
The Renunciation of Queen Elizabeth of Hungary |
|
|

James Collinson
Temptation

James Collinson
Home Again
1856

James Collinson
The Empty Purse

James Collinson
Answering the Emigrant's Letter
1850

James Collinson
Holy Family

James Collinson
Childhood
1855

James Collinson
Boys at a Roadside Alehouse |
|
|
|
|
|
|
CONTENTS |
|
|
|
|
|