The Pre-Raphaelites: From a rebellious brotherhood to wealthy art celebrities
His name conjures up the image of tasteful patterned wallpapers and fabrics; he is revered as one of the founders of architecture's Arts and Craft movement. Yet in his lifetime, in the 19th century, William Morris was best known as a poet and author of weighty Icelandic sagas. An avid and active socialist, he was a campaigner for issues as diverse as the exploitation of children and workers as well as the protection – rather than the renovation - of crumbling ancient buildings.
Arguably he was ahead of his time: an environmentalist, particularly concerned about the pollution of rivers in the wake of the industrial revolution, an advocate for workers' rights and a believer in the democratisation of design.
Ophelia by John Everett Millais: model Elizabeth Siddal fell ill posing in a cold bath.Credit:Tate Gallery
Problematically for Morris, a man known to explode in a hot temper, he also existed, for a time, in an unhappy menage a trois. "His wife Jane Burden,a stablehand's daughter whom he met at Oxford, was the great love of his life," says Roisin Inglesby, curator of the William Morris gallery in Walthamstow at the northern end of London's Victoria tube line. "Unfortunately, the great love of her life was the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. For a time, Rossetti even moved into the Morris' Cotswold home, at which stage, William Morris took himself off to Iceland, either because he couldn't stand it or as a tactical withdrawal."
Morris was on the periphery of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of young and rebellious artists who initially scandalised and challenged the art and moral conventions of Victorian England but who evolved into Britain's first art celebrities – rich, famous and selling merchandise, such as affordable reproductions and guide books, as their works were displayed at ticketed blockbuster events around the nation.
Looking for Lancelot: The Lady of Shalott by John William WaterhouseCredit:Tate Gallery
"They lived in an era of tremendous global change when everything was being redefined – beliefs and values, work and love – and they experimented with all of these; their convictions, lifestyle and relationships were as radical as their art" says Carol Jacobi, the Tate Britain's curator of British Art 1850-1915, a pre-eminent expert on the Pre-Raphaelites.
The personable and erudite Jacobi, who, like the women of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, favours flowing locks and clothing, is the co-curator of the National Gallery of Australia's own summer blockbuster Love & Desire: Pre-Raphaelite Masterpieces from the Tate, which will be shown from December 14 to April 28.
While the biggest drawcards will be the Tate's "destination works" Ophelia by John Everett Millais and the Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse – which are leaving the walls of the London gallery together for the first time – the show includes 80 other works from the Tate and other galleries. William Morris will be represented by two tapestries and his painting La Belle Iseult, which was scorned by critics of the day and turned him away from painting. The designer has a special link with Australia; South Australia's Barr-Smith family were besotted customers in the late 19th century, buying up big at the William Morris shop on occasional trips to London to decorate their houses. The Art Gallery of South Australia has benefited from their substantial collection.
In 1848, a year of great political turmoil in Europe, the "brotherhood" came together at the prestigious yet stuffy Royal Academy and set out to challenge the traditional art world's continuing obsession with the great masters – Raphael, da Vinci and and Michelangelo. They provocatively advocated a return to the earlier medieval and early renaissance painters ("the Pre-Raphaelites") who they admired as romantic figures, focused on naturalism and symbolism. The core group of seven, who were only in their late teens and early 20s, were Millais, William Holman Hunt, Frederick George Stephens, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson and the Rossetti brothers Dante Gabriel and William Michael (whose sister, poet Christina, was refused entry to the brotherhood on the grounds of her gender). Publishing a manifesto in the form of a journal, The Germ, the brotherhood operated as a tight group for only five years, although their friendships continued and other creative folk such as Morris and John William Waterhouse became part of the milieu. Their body of distinctive work, immortalised as posters and prints ever since on many a bedroom wall, is still highly relevant today.
Detail of Astarte Syriaca, 1877Credit:Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Manchester Art Gallery
"What interests me about the Pre-Raphaelites is that they weren't just about a crazy and radical form of art. They were actually thinking about how people should live and about relationships at a time when a lot was being redefined. Because of their age, they were exploring their first love affairs," says Jacobi, as we watch the packing of works at a warehouse in a secret location on the outskirts of London. "Capitalism had pressured people to make financially secure marriages; the Pre-Raphaelites were exploring love and looking at how difficult it was to be true to love."
To the horror of their families, this included forming relationships outside their class. The Pre-Raphaelites also challenged notions of conventional beauty, painting women with strong faces and hands. Uncorsetted bodies and flowing red-headed locks scandalised polite society in an era of crinolines and bonnets, although eventually they were seen as harbingers of the quest for wider personal freedoms for women, including female suffrage. Women in the Pre-Raphaelite circle were not confined as love interests or models; they began to create their own work. "We know a lot more about them than we did 10 years ago but this is a continuing area of research," says Jacobi. Love & Desire includes two works by Elizabeth Siddal, a former Leicester Square hat shop assistant who modelled for Ophelia and later studied at the Sheffield School of Art before her death from an overdose of laudanum at age 32.
William Morris: Sagas, socialism and wallpaper.Credit:Rights Managed
The curator says that while the subject matter of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings was challenging, the artists weren't dogmatic or moralising. "The viewer is posed a lot of questions. With the industrial revolution, the world was changing so quickly. No longer were artists making pictures for patrons or portraits of important people." Primarily atheists, the artists explored the Bible, using themselves as models to portray New Testament figures as regular working people. Even Charles Dickens was shocked by Millais' portrayal of Mary (modelled by the artist's sister-in-law) and Joseph (Millais' father for the head and the local grocer for the body). Christian teachings were being challenged by discoveries in science, geology, Darwinism.
Nick Mitzevich, the director of the NGA, says the power of the Pre-Raphaelites is that they connected with the basic principles of living. "Their paintings draw heavily from literature, poetry, music, religion – you feel the reverberations in all these paintings. You get seduced into the narrative and, for me, art is so alluring when it has a story to tell. There wasn't another time when all those influences were so potent."
Detail of The Annunication by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1849Credit:Sam Drake
Aside from exploring the moral and societal tensions of the day, the Pre-Raphaelites capitalised on advances in technology. The ability to create affordable reproductions of their work generated a lucrative revenue flow. They were preoccupied with the new colours of paints and dyes emanating from the burgeoning textile industry, most notably purples and greens. Working on white rather than neutral-coloured canvases and mixing varnish into the paint, produced a backlit effect in their work. A luminosity, hard to capture in reproductions, even today and perhaps one of the reasons that the Tate Britain fields so many repeat visitors keen to revisit the images in "real life".
The Canberra exhibition is impressive in the number of major works it brings together. There are only a relatively small number of Pre-Raphaelite works as the artists were slow and obsessive workers. Take the creation of Ophelia. Millais spent five months on the banks of the Hogsmill River, outside London, observing and capturing the murky water and foliage before inclement autumn weather forced him to retreat into a makeshift shelter. Finally returning to London, he spent many months more painting the unfortunate heroine who, in Shakespeare's Hamlet, dies offstage. Elizabeth Siddal was roped in to pose, lying for hours in a cold bath, clad in a wedding dress so he could observe the exact appearance of her hair trailing in the water and the sodden brocade. Not surprisingly, Siddal fell ill; the artist had to pay for her medical bills.
Bird tapestry by William Morris, 1878Credit:Studio
Jacobi, who was introduced to the Ophelia as a young teen when her family made annual pilgrimages by coach from Birmingham to see the work, says: "The painting does have a real impact. I think it might be the colour, there is no sky and you are completely enveloped in this amazing wall of green. It might be the pathos of the figure, you are so physically near to her. I couldn't put my finger on what made her so important to my family but it was an important influence on me and encouraged me to study art. I feel very humble that I get to work with her and show her to an audience now."
The significance or the message of the paintings was often lost in the Victorian era. William Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience, was a radical comment on a fallen woman but viewers at the Royal Academy mistook it for a picture of a brother and sister, due to the lack of a chaperone. "What Hunt had actually painted was an aristocratic man who had irresponsibly seduced a young woman – probably from the working classes – and set her up in what she would have thought was luxury in St John's Wood. In the painting, she has just jumped off the gentleman's lap and is looking out a window, reflected in a mirror, realising that this is not what she wants. You get the sense that there is another choice." Waterhouse's The Lady of Shalott, based on the Tennyson poem, also depicts a woman taking control – no longer condemned to stay in her tower, she has ventured out to pursue Sir Lancelot.. Arthur Hughes' April Love provoked another controversy: she is receiving a man, outside, in "a petticoat with no corset, although the scarf around her waist adds a little bit of decorum".
Detail of The Awakening Conscience by William Holman Hunt, 1853Credit:Hunt, William Holman
Slightly younger than the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris fell in with them when he was studying for the church, a calling he abandoned briefly for architecture before being swept up by Dante Gabriel Rossetti to paint murals at the Oxford Union. "Morris hated how the workers of industrialised England were being treated," says Roisin Inglesby. "He thought it was unjust and immoral to treat men as machinery. He also saw this as detrimental for art and design. His whole idea was that beauty, art and creativity come through joy. If you have a workforce who are well treated, they will produce things that are worthy. It is better to have a few things well made by people who are not exploited. He believed that art should be for all, not just something for the elite to have on their walls".
Unlike Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was "not a hopeful man", Morris believed in political activism to effect societal change. On the Thames riverbank at Hammersmith, Helen Elletson, another enthusiast, is the curator of the William Morris Society in another Morris home which doubled as a meeting room for the Socialist League. "If you had asked Morris what he was proudest of, it was his key role in founding the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings," she says. "He was passionate about saving the integrity of buildings, campaigning to stop hundreds of buildings being demolished or restored."
Aurelia (Fazio’s Mistress) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, modelled by Fanny Cornforth, The Tate Gallery.Credit:Rossetti, Dante Gabriel
A designer rather than a talented artist like his friends, Morris believed in "simple, beautiful and elegant materials. He said: "have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful". As well as establishing the company that evolved into the design brand Morris and Company, another key contribution was the imaginative creation of Red House, in rural Kent, designed by the architect Philip Webb, and decorated with murals and tapestries by Morris, Jane Burden and their artistic circle. This was the genesis of the Arts and Crafts movement, a creative reaction to industrialised progress.
In an essay for the Love & Desire catalogue, the Tate's Jacobi sums up the broader influence of the Pre-Raphaelites and the reasoning behind the exhibition: "These pioneering men and women defended artistic and personal freedom against middle-class conventions and led modern art in breaking away from the Academy to reach new audiences." A show in Canberra is the epitome of these beliefs.
Love & Desire: Pre-Raphaelite Masterpieces from the Tate, will be at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra from December 14 to April 28. Shona Martyn travelled to London as a guest of the Gallery.
Most Viewed in Entertainment
Please explain
Our weekly podcast giving you insight into the stories that drive the nation.
Listen now