Patrick Bade
The Pre-Raphaelite Revolution, Part 1

Patrick Bade - The Pre-Raphaelite Revolution, Part 1

- We have Millais’ Ophelia on the screen. And it is certainly one of the most widely-known and loved paintings by any British artist. And even when Victorian painting in general went out of fashion and was critically despised, the Pre-Raphaelites never lost their hold over the hearts of the British public. But first of all, I really need to say, try and explain what Pre-Raphaelite-ism is. Pre-Raphaelite is a term that’s used in a variety of different ways, used and abused I would say. Possibly even more than the term Impressionist. Now, in the 19th Century, when people talked about the Pre-Raphaelites, what they meant, or before the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded anyway, what they meant was artists before Raphael. They were talking about the Quattrocento. So Botticelli and Ghirlandata would’ve been Pre-Raphaelite artists for them. Just occasionally, that the term is used that way even today. But mostly, we apply it to a group of 19th Century British artists. But even if we do that, which is the correct way to use it, it applies to two very different types of painting, which is why I’m talking about Pre-Raphaelites over two lectures. Tonight and again on Wednesday. So on your screen now, you can see William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience. And Edward Burne-Jones’ King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. And they’re both paintings which can very correctly be called Pre-Raphaelite. But if you did a compare and contrast between the two, they wouldn’t really have very much in common. In fact, in many ways, they’re polar opposites. The Holman Hunt is a kind of Realism. It belongs to the wider Realist movement with a capital R in the 19th Century dealing with the here and now, the real world, real people, real social problems and so on. Whereas the Burne-Jones is completely escapist picture. It’s turning its back on the real world.

And it’s set in some kind of mythical place both time-wise and geographically. So I’ll be talking about the Burne-Jones type of Pre-Raphaelite-ism in my next talk. Now, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in the year 1848. It was the year of revolutions. You’ve heard from all of us about the goings on of 1848. There was change in the air. And there were three young students at the Royal Academy in London. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais. And they all met up in the summer of 1848. And there was a kind of spontaneous combustion when they got together. What they agreed upon was that they completely despised their teachers at the Royal Academy. They despised the kind of art that was popular with the Victorian public and that you saw in the Royal Academy summer exhibition. So they disliked the trivial anecdotalism of artists like Wilkie, you see on the left-hand side, the sentimentality of Landseer at the top. And they disliked sensuality. They disliked sloshiness, they disliked like painterly painting. So they were absolutely reacting against the kind of sensual, painterly sloshiness of an artist like. God, another I’m really afflicted these days with suddenly not remembering names. I do hope you’ll forgive me. So this is Dante Gabriel Rossetti on the left. This is his self-portrait. And looking mean, moody rockstar. He was a very charismatic man. He was three-quarters Italian. His father was completely Italian, was a revolutionary in favour of Italian unification.

And he was also a Dante scholar, and his mother was half Italian, half English. So as far as the English were concerned in the 19th Century, there was always something a bit exotic about Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with his sulphurous Latin good looks. Now, on the right-hand side is a pen and ink drawing by Millais of his caricature of post-Raphaelite art. So not only did they despise all the art that they could see at the Royal Academy, and their teachers, and all of that, they also despised all the art since and including Raphael. So we see on this piece of paper the kind of art they disapproved of, a simpering, Raphael Madonna on the left-hand side, hysterical Italian baroque saints rolling their eyeballs and shedding tears at the top. And nasty, grubby little Dutchmen from Dutch 17th Century realist paintings, bottom right-hand corner. So what they wanted to do, they said, was to go back to art, the nobility, the purity, the truthfulness of art before Raphael. Before what Ruskin, who was also rather anti-Raphael, he talked about the clear and tasteless poison of Raphael that has infected the souls of millions. So they’re all listening to what Ruskin had to say. So they wanted to go back to this earlier phase of art, but they didn’t really have much direct knowledge of it. It was all rather theoretical. None of them had been to Italy when they formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. You have to remember that a photographic reproduction was really in its infancy. So they couldn’t even really have seen many paintings from before Raphael, even in photographic reproduction. And the National Gallery had only about a half a dozen pictures dating before the time of Raphael. It was not yet really fashionable to collect that kind of art.

The one very, very important exception to this is the van Eyck Married to Arnolfini, which had just been bought, I think I mentioned last time, It was bought for the relatively modest sum of 600 guineas. And the Pre-Raphaelites were fascinated by this picture. You could easily do actually a whole lecture on the impact of this picture on British artists in the 19th Century, actually, and into the 20th Century. So they were fascinated by its brilliance of colour, that this van Eyck was one of the pioneers of oil painting. And he exploited, he was certainly first to really exploit what you could do with it. You have a white ground over which there is a drawing. And then over that there are layers, transparent layers of colour with the oil media. And you can get this incredible richness and intensity. And this jewel-like quality. And they’re also fascinated by his obsessive attention to real appearances. I’m looking at this on my screen and it doesn’t look like a very good reproduction. I must see if I can get a better one, a sharper one. But anyway, the only way to really appreciate this painting is to stand in front of it in the National Gallery. It is so amazing. I mean, every hair of that dog is painted individually, and its little wet nose and its shiny eyes. It’s a miracle. This painting, really a miracle of concentrated observation. And the other thing that fascinated them was that it’s very evident in this picture, yeah, everything is real, yes, it’s painted from reality, but everything means something. That everything carries some symbolic meaning. Now, different scholars will give you different interpretations of this painting. But what they all are agreed on is that it means something.

There is a complex symbolic language. So where did they turn to gain their knowledge of painting before Raphael? Etty, the name was of course, William Etty. I’m sorry, it’s terrible. Sometimes it’s a kind of stress, you just cannot pull the name out of your brain. But so, yes, there were visual sources and they were primarily engravings. And Rossetti got hold of a book by an Italian artist called Lasinio, that had engravings after the frescoes, the Quattrocento frescoes in the Camposanto in Pisa. And this is one of the illustrations of that book. So that was a major source for them. And as I shall stress in a minute when talking about their drawings, of course, that really influenced how they thought of 15th Century art. That it emphasised the, because these are line engravings, it emphasised the linear quality of this art. Now this is William Holman Hunt, and this is the picture that he submitted, and it was shown at the Royal Academy summer exhibition of 1848. It’s a narrative picture. It tells a story, and it’s based on the narrative poem by Keats, Keats was a big favourite of the Pre-Raphaelites. The Eve of St. Agnes. And it shows the two lovers escaping from the castle at the height of a party. And so, William Holman Hunt in later years really liked to claim a sort of preeminent role in the creation of the Pre-Raphaelites. And to some extent, that may be true ‘cause this picture certainly of the three artists, what they were doing before they came together and founded the brotherhood, this is the one that looks most Pre-Raphaelite. I think partly because of its medievalism. This is what Millais was working on. Nothing like a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

Much closer to Etty, the sort of sloshy sensuality of Etty. It’s a classical subject, Simon and Iphigenia. It’s from classical mythology. It’s very accomplished. It’s a ghastly painting, what can you say? But it is accomplished. And of all the three, Millais was certainly the most technically-sophisticated and accomplished. So now this is really an amazing contrast. Look, he’s working on this in 1848, then he meets Rossetti and Holman Hunt. And as I said, it’s like a spontaneous combustion. And along with a couple of other friends, they found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, seven of them originally. But only the three I’ve mentioned are really important. And so, he temporarily abandons this picture and instead he produces this picture. And actually goes back to Simon and Iphigenia to finish it off after he’s finished this. And you think, wow, that is really strange 'cause this is so different. This is arguably the first great Pre-Raphaelite picture, the first great product of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. And it’s an astonishing, astonishing painting. I’ve only seen it in reality a couple of times. It’s normally in Liverpool. It’s also inspired by another, it’s another poem by Keats, Isabella, or the Pot of Basil. And it’s a tragic love story. Isabella, whose sister to two evil brothers who are merchants or bankers. And Lorenzo is their employer. And Lorenzo and Isabella fall in love with one another, but the brothers don’t want her to marry a socially-inferior person. So they have him murdered and secretly buried in a forest. So this shows an early scene in that narrative, and you have the young man looking solicitously, and offering an orange to the girl.

That is Lorenzo looking at Isabella. Now, the Pre-Raphaelites firmly believed, one of their slogans was 'select nothing, reject nothing.’ Everything had to be truthful, everything had to be painted from life. And so, and this is in this technique that they developed, this is the first painting in a completely new, very strange technique, really, which they believed was an equivalent of fresco. Well, actually they didn’t have a clue what fresco entailed. What about the technique of fresco? This technique is actually closer to the technique of the Flemish artists of the 15th Century, to van Eyck. So they’re working on a white ground. And again, there’s an under drawing. And then like the Flemish artist, thin layers of transparent oil paint. And that’s what accounts for the incredible intensity of colour of these early Pre-Raphaelite pictures. I always feel that if you put them in a darkened room, they glow in the dark. The colour and the light seems to positively emanate from the picture. Incredibly sharp detail. Even though this is actually quite a good reproduction, it doesn’t come anywhere near the sharpness of the original. So everybody in this picture is painted from a real person. I mean, the two brothers are actually painted from Dante Gabriel Rossetti. So you can see the two brothers on the left-hand side, the one in the foreground sticking out his leg. Here’s a detail of the background. You can see the other brother also painted from Rossetti. And then that very beautiful, rather classical smiling face with a straight nose. That’s an artist friend called Walter Deverell.

He died very young and only produced a couple of paintings. But probably his most important contribution to Pre-Raphaelite-ism was the discovery of Lizzie Siddal, the muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He discovered her working in a hat shop, but I’ll be talking more about that next time. So here’s another amazing detail of one of the evil brothers. Cracking nuts, painted from Rossetti. And this row of heads, bumpy row of heads in profile. All this was really very novel and quite disturbing to the critics. I mean, they’d never seen a picture like this before. And it mostly got very, very negative reviews. And another factor in the hostility that the Pre-Raphaelites met when they first exhibited was that all three artists in 1849, when they first exhibited, two of Holman Hunt and Millais at the Royal Academy, and Rossetti at the British Institution, they all signed their pictures with the mystic letters, PRB. Well, we know that means Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but people at the time didn’t know that. And they were puzzled and they were worried by it because this is the period of revolutionaries and secret brotherhoods. And they worried that this was something menacing and sinister. And Rossetti didn’t really help very much because people would say to Rossetti, “What does this PRB mean?” And he’d say, “Oh, it means please ring bell.” Or if he really wanted to be provocative, he’d say, “It means penis rather better.” This is the painting that Holman Hunt sent to the Royal Academy of 1849. Based on the novel by Lord Lytton, “Rienzi.” So actually I can see why people were slightly worried about seditious elements in these pictures. ‘Cause the Keats poem actually has a kind of very strong anti-capitalist theme. There is a tremendously powerful denunciation of the rapaciousness of capitalism in that poem.

There’s a wonderful passage where it says, these people sitting in an office in Florence scribbling away in a ledger, and the consequences are felt all around the world. “The diver goes to the hungry shark,” is one of the things. All the terrible consequences of this capitalist organisation based in Florence. And “Rienzi” also was, of course, Wagner took it up. Around, well actually, had taken up Rienzi before this. It’s a few years before this painting was exhibited. And “Rienzi” was about, again, a mediaeval proto-revolutionary. Again in this very hard, smooth style. Can’t see any individual brushstrokes. And the very strong colours. And you can just make it out also in the bottom right-hand corner, the signature with the PRB. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was quite a short-lived organisation. In fact, it was never really a very organised organisation. There were, it was a quite a short period when they were having formal meetings. That soon fell away. And they all, as far as there is a common style to the three main artists, it’s in the drawings. And this is a Millais preliminary drawing for Isabella, or the Pot of Basil. Lorenzo and Isabella. And you can see what I mean about it being very, very firmly linear. And I think this is because it was a style, it was based on their sources. Were actually printed sources. This is an illustration from a book, again, that was discovered by Rossetti. Shared by him with his friends with great enthusiasm.

It’s an illustrated Faust, Goethe’s Faust. Illustrated by a minor artist called Retsch. That’s R-E-T-S-C-T-H, I think it is, Retsch. And so you can, I think, see a similarity in the style. And here two drawings, these drawings were actually exchanged between Millais and Rossetti. The drawing, the rose bush on the left-hand side is a drawing by Millais that was given to Rossetti. And the drawing on the right was a drawing by Rossetti that was given to Millais. I have to say, I think that Rossetti got the better deal here. As I said, Millais was by far the most accomplished of all these artists, technically. And Rossetti was the least accomplished. I mean, there is an element in Rossetti’s work, there’s a big show on in London, so those of you in Britain can go and see it, there is always an element of the amateur. And there is something tentative and amateur about that drawing on the right-hand side. And by that, I don’t wish to denigrate him because I have the hugest admiration for Rossetti. And he’s a genius in a way that Millais isn’t. Millais is a talent, whereas Rossetti, despite the feebleness sometimes of his technique, is a far more original artist, it seems. He’s the most original, and the most creative, and eventually the most influential of all the Pre-Raphaelites. But having said that, Millais produced over a fairly short period of time, between 1849 and the mid-1850s, a series of really magisterial and extraordinary pictures. This is the picture he sent the Royal Academy in 1850. The Carpenter’s Shop or Christ in the House of His Parents. And these early Pre-Raphaelite pictures by Millais and Holman Hunt, they have an almost hallucinatory, hyper-real quality. So once again, everything had to be painted truthfully from reality.

So he used his father for the head of Joseph. Joseph was a carpenter. So he actually got a real carpenter to pose for the arms. He painted this picture in his studio in Gower Street in London, in Bloomsbury. And he didn’t have access to real sheep. He bought sheep’s heads from a butcher. And so you’ll see on the left-hand side the sheep, that’s all we see 'cause he’s put a fence across 'cause he didn’t have the bodies to paint the bodies. And again, if you stand in front of this picture, it’s astonishing. You know that every wood shaving is actually a portrait of a real wood shaving. It wasn’t something that he’s invented. Once again, this combination of hallucinatory hyper-realism is combined with an elaborate symbolism. So we have the Christ child who has wounded himself with nails in the carpenter shop in the hand and the foot. So that is a premonition of the crucifixion. St. John the Baptist comes in on the right-hand side with a bowl of water to cleanse the wounds. So that is the premonition of baptism. The sheep, that’s us. Sheep is humanity. The dove is the Holy Ghost. The triangle on the wall is the trinity. The red flower is a symbol of the passion. So all the way through, every detail actually means something. So you’ve got some nice, nice details to show you. There are the sheep in the background. And if you go and look at this picture, take a look at the way the pelt of John the Baptist’s loincloth is painted. Once again, following the example of van Eyck, every single hair of that pelt is painted individually. Now the painting was absolutely trashed by the critics. They absolutely hated it. This time, it wasn’t so much political subversiveness that worried them, but religious subversiveness. You have to remember that in England, Catholicism had only just been legalised.

It’d only just been made possible for Catholics to openly practise their faith. And there was a kind of paranoia about Catholics infiltrating. It was a bit, you could say, the attitude to Catholics in England in the mid-19th Century was like the attitude to communists in America in the McCarthy period. A sort of total hysteria of anxiety about the country being somehow infiltrated or poisoned by Catholicism. And this all looked too Catholic for words. And one of the harshest critics of all was Charles Dickens. And he wrote an absolutely thunderous denunciation of this picture. Particularly the care-worn, anxious face of the virgin. This was just too much realism. And Dickens said, “You would have to search "the lowest gin shop in England "and the violist cabaret in France "to find a woman as ugly and depraved as the virgin Mary "in this picture.” What a silly, silly man. Well, actually Millais was quite forgiving. Because later, he and Dickens became quite friendly. So these pictures. Well, people often say to me about a picture, ooh, how long did it take to paint? Well, that’s always an impossible question to answer. I always kind of bite my lip when people say that. I think, how long is a piece of string? I don’t know. You know, it depends on the artist, it depends on so many things. But one thing you can be sure of, these were not painted quickly. These were painted, this is a very, very laborious technique indeed. Two more paintings by Millais, The Woodman’s Daughter based on a narrative poem by Coventry Patmore on the left-hand side. And Ferdinand and Isabella, based on Shakespeare’s Tempest. And so another thing which would’ve been new was the fact that you’ve got real outdoor lighting. Usually the Impressionists are credited with being the first artists of painting outdoor, strong sunlight. But that’s not true. The Pre-Raphaelites had got there first. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of going through a big museum, historic collection, and getting to the 19th Century. And seeing, well Impressionists, all these pictures.

And suddenly thinking, “Ooh, I need to pull out my sunglasses. "The light, the intensity of the light is so strong.” The difference of course between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Impressionists is the Impressionists are trying to get down everything. That’s a rapid technique. I mean, theoretically, I don’t think it very often happened, an Impressionist picture was painted in one go. In one day. You couldn’t paint something like this in one day. So it was a great problem for the Impressionists trying to paint outdoors truthfully. And struggling with the English climate. And there are famous stories about this wonderful picture, that Millais had awful problems. I mean, he found what he thought was the ideal situation. It was a brook, I think it was near Dorking, in Surrey. But he got chased out of a field by a bull. And the weather was against him. There were constant downpours of rain. So in fact, the whole picture was not painted out of doors as he wished. He cheated because he finished off the picture in his studio back in London. And he bought cut flowers. And when he originally painted the picture, he painted, there were daffodils in it. And Ruskin came around to watch him work. And Ruskin said, “Uh uh, daffodils have got to go, "can’t have daffodils because daffodils "and roses don’t bloom at the same time in the wild.” So Millais was rather abashed at being called out. And the daffodils were got rid of. But the most famous stories concerning this picture are of Lizzie Siddal. And… ooh. I see that my picture has disappeared. I hope that means you can still hear me anyway. So, and it suddenly got very dark 'cause there’s a storm going on outside. But anyway, back to Lizzie Siddal.

• You can hear me okay, can you?

• [Lauren] Yes, and the picture is the same one as from your first slide. Is that what you want?

• Good, fine, fine, fine. Thank you, thank you, Lauren. So she worked in a hat shop. And as I said, she was discovered by Walter Deverell and she moved in with Rossetti, they became lovers, and they eventually married. And she was lent by Rossetti to Millais. I dunno whether she had much say in it. And she posed in the bath for this picture. And she was too shy, he was too concentrated on what he was doing to pay attention. And she was too shy to tell him that the water got freezing cold. And she actually got quite ill as a result of this. Two more of these rather rare paintings by Millais in this Pre-Raphaelite style. I mean, again, both of these pictures, no reproduction on a computer can possibly do justice to the incredible intensity of observation of reality. Both these pictures actually inspired by operas. I presume that Millais was a keen opera-goer, 'cause the painting on the left was inspired by Bellini’s I puritani. And it’s a scene of the English civil war. And the one on the right is inspired by Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. Originally, he intended to call it Two Lovers Whispering by a War. But he thought, no, the English public, they want something to get their teeth into. They want something more than that. So he gave it a very elaborate title. As I said, inspired by Meyerbeer’s opera. So the full title of this picture is A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing a Roman Catholic Badge. So that was a really clever one. Tick, tick, tick with the English public. 'Cause it’s anti-French, it’s anti-Catholic, and it fits entirely with the then prejudices of the great British public. So the Pre-Raphaelites in 1849 and '50, they got the most terrible reviews. And as I mentioned last time, artists in the 19th Century, by this time are extremely dependent on newspaper reviews. So it was a wonderful thing when the most influential critic of all, Ruskin, came to their rescue.

He wrote an article an open letter to the Times saying he thought that the Pre-Raphaelites were the most exciting, and the best thing that had happened to British art since the Reformation in the 16th Century. So he takes up all the Pre-Raphaelites. Initially Millais, well he was the obvious, as I said, obviously the most talented. And he swept Millais up to Scotland, to Glenfinlas. And he commissioned him to paint this very famous portrait. And it’s months, and months, and months through a whole summer painting every striation of the rock, obsessively. Here’s another picture by Millais of the same expedition. But while all this was going on, of course, there were interesting things going on beneath the surface. Now Ruskin was regarded as a kind of god. He was a very handsome man. And he married a girl called Effie Grey, who was considered to be one of the loveliest girls in London. And they were a kind of golden couple. And at this point, they had been married for five years, and there were no children. And so, relatives were concerned about this. And her relatives, her female relatives, they probed gently. And they discovered that the reason there were no children was that the marriage had never been consummated. So male relatives were then sent off to Ruskin to say, “Is everything okay, dear boy?” And he said, not in quite explicit words, but if you read the letters, it’s very, very clear what he means. That he had only ever seen a female body represented in a painting or a sculpture. Before his wedding night. And he was so shocked on his wedding night to discover that women have pubic hair, that he was never able to consummate the marriage. This is a very famous story, of course, much repeated.

And it tells you so much really about the English in the 19th Century. It’s very clear to us, 'cause we have such a different view of all these things, later Ruskin kept on falling in love with pubescent or even prepubescent girls. And we would immediately identify him today as a paedophile. He didn’t understand that. Nobody had, didn’t exist, that concept in the 19th Century. And I think one has to regard him as actually a rather tragic character in this respect. So eventually what happened was that Effie left Ruskin. And she had to undergo, it must have been a dreadful, dreadful, humiliating, awful thing for her, she had to undergo a doctor’s inspection that proved that she was still a virgin, the marriage had never been consummated. It could therefore be, what’s the word for it? I mean, it could just be dissolved, the marriage. And she was free to marry Millais, which she did. And it was, I’m afraid it was out of the frying pan into the fire there 'cause he had the sexual appetite of a bunny rabbit. And after a while she was, I think, pretty sick of producing children. And the really hard thing is, I mean, is that nobody ever held any of this against Ruskin. I’m not saying that they should’ve done, but what they should not have done is hold it against Effie, and that they did. So she was, of course, this is her in this picture, this is a drawing. Ooh, it’s pouring with rain outside as I say this to you. It goes very well with this image. Millais kept a kind of diary of things that happened on this trip to Scotland. And obviously, on one occasion, he went out with Effie and they were caught in a rainstorm. So they had to share a coat. And I’m sure, very innocently, there must have been a tremendous free song of desire between the two of them. But she was pretty well-shunned by polite society for most of her life because of this. And it just shows you how incredibly hypocritical the Victorians were. It was right to the end of his life when he was dying, he was dying of throat cancer.

And Queen Victoria sent him a message to ask if she could do anything to make him feel better. And he sent a message back saying, will the Queen receive my wife? Because once Queen Victoria had received her, then nobody else had an excuse to shun her. Here she is. This is really almost an Impressionist painting 'cause it’s rather more loosely painted and clearly painted out of doors. And painted relatively quickly, I would say, on the left-hand side, it’s a painting called Waiting. And I find it extraordinarily poignant picture, actually. What’s she waiting for? Well, she’s waiting I suppose, to be released from her marriage to Ruskin. So the next picture that Millais sent to the Royal Academy, we’re into the late-1850s now, is this one on the right-hand side. Called The Order of Release, also a tremendously famous, popular picture with the English public. And it caused a sensation at the Royal Academy, partly because of all the gossip about Ruskin. And also because they knew that the woman in the picture was posed for by Effie. So there was a kind of real morbid interest in this picture. It’s a story of the Jacobite Rebellion and a brave Scotsman who’s been captured, and is now being released. And of course, the key thing in this picture for the English, is the dog. We love dogs. And I have to say in that respect, I’m as English as anybody, totally soppy about dogs. I much prefer it when people show me their dogs on their mobile phone to their grandchildren. But so, but dogs. And the Victorian artists were very, very proprietorial about subject matter. And who was Mr. Dog, or Sir Dog? That was Sir Edwin Landseer.

So Millais was actually quite nervous about painting a dog in his picture in such a prominent place. So he actually wrote a letter to Landseer, saying, “Dear, Sir Edwin, I’d like to include a dog in my picture. "Will you give me permission?” And Landseer graciously gave him permission. And it’s a wonderful dog. What can I tell you? This illustration doesn’t begin to do justice. When you stand in front of that picture, you feel you could stroke that dog. It’s so amazing the way it’s painted. Here’s a detail with Effie’s face. So Ruskin hadn’t, although of course there was a rupture between him and Millais, but he hadn’t totally, in a way, got his claws out of Millais. I mean, Ruskin was so influential, all he had to do was in a review or an article suggest that a subject would be a good one. And artists rushed to paint it. And in one article, he said he thought that Spring blossom would be a good subject. So of course, following Royal Academy summer exhibition was full of paintings of spring blossoming orchards. Including this one by Millais. And I’m trying to remember what the title of this picture is. But it marks a change of direction. I think it’s just called Apple Blossoms actually. Because all the pictures I’ve shown you up to now have been moralising storytelling pictures. And this is a picture, it shows him experimenting with a new kind of picture, which there’s no story here. And there is a symbolism, but it’s of a rather vaguer kind. It’s really a painting about the transitoriness of youth and beauty. You’ve got these lovely young girls, a freeze of young girls in the foreground. You have the scythe on the right-hand side. That is of course a symbol of death. Eventually they will all be scythed. I mean, these are girls, if this is painted in 1857, these are all girls who are born around 1840. So they’re very, very, very long dead. And of course, the blossom two. It’s an ephemeral thing. The beauty of blossom.

One of those brief moments that’s so wonderful in the year when you have the blossom. And his next picture is following up on this approach or theme. It’s called Autumn Leave. So it’s the other end of the year. And it’s still the same theme really, isn’t it? Because it’s that beautiful moment, that’s a brief moment, at the end of the day. And that beautiful part-time the year, that’s quite brief, the end of the summer. And the leaves that are being burned. So again, it’s a symbol of the brevity of youth and beauty. Now these are, to me, I really love these pictures and I think they’re absolutely wonderful. But Millais was, he was a materialistic man. He was a typical Victorian. He wanted money, he wanted success. And these pictures were not understood by the Victorian public. They didn’t like them. They missed their storytelling. They liked their T’s to be crossed. They liked their I’s to be dotted. And these two, these pictures were too vague in a way for the Victorian public. So then what Millais, I told you, he was the highest-earning artist in Britain, earning 30,000 pounds a year, able to build himself a palatal townhouse. And he had a shooting box in the Shires, and all that. Well, how to pay for that? And by painting pictures like these, which of course Victorian public absolutely adored. Kitschy, sweet paintings of adorable children. And the one on the right was the first one, and its title was My First Sermon. And then that was such a huge success, he follows up with My Second Sermon, where the little girl is not quite so alert, and she’s become gored. What to say about these pictures? I mean, they’re very well painted, but they’re kind of creepy. This one is the one that in a way did more to destroy Millais’ critical reputation than anything else, called Bubbles.

One very unkind artist, there is this sort of myth, isn’t there? That art and marriage don’t go well together. Somebody asked Degas, “Why have you never married?” And he said, “Because I’m afraid that my wife "might come up behind me and say, ”‘That’s a nice picture you’re painting, dear.’“ And one critic said that if Ruskin had stayed married to Effie, he would’ve written Bubbles. Well, I think that’s very unfair. It’s funny, but it’s totally unfair. I shouldn’t even repeat it really. But, so this painting was bought by Pears’ Soap. And they used it for their posters to advertise Pears’ Soap. And that is not Millais’ vault. He didn’t sanction that. He had no control over it. But it certainly harmed him critically. So Holman Hunt, we move on to these two pictures. Although they don’t have an exactly similar format. Early Pre-Raphaelites, they love these coved tops that look a bit like tombstones. And these two pictures actually do correspond with one another. The scene on the left-hand side is the moment that a fallen woman, that her conscience awakens. And the Light of the World is the moment that Jesus is knocking on the door of the Christian conscience. And you can see it’s overgrown. It hasn’t been open to him for many years. And I can see I’m going to run out of time even doing Pre-Raphaelites in two sessions. So, and there are lots of very, very funny stories about the painting of the Light of the World. That he tried to paint it by moonlight, and had a lot of difficulty. And then there wasn’t enough light coming from the lantern. So he had a gas jet put in the lantern, and then the lantern became red hot, all that kind of stuff.

There are many, many wonderful, colourful stories about the travails of the Pre-Raphaelites in producing these incredible pictures. But this is a painting, and I find it totally mesmerising and fascinating in some ways, and totally ghastly in others. It’s a painting you have to read. Like all of these Victorian paintings, you are meant to stand in front of it. It’s quite, I noticed, especially in recent years, when I took students to see it, I wouldn’t explain it to them. I’d say, "You explain it to me. "What do you think is happening in this picture?” They don’t have a clue what is going on in this picture. Whereas a Victorian person knows exactly everything, what’s going on here. This is a woman in her undress. She’s not fully dressed, she’s sitting on a man’s lap. She’s not married to him. If you look at her hand, there are rings on every finger, but not the marriage finger. She’s not got a wedding ring. So she’s an unmarried woman sitting on a man’s lap. She’s a fallen woman, she is a kept woman. And it was a big thing that Victorian’s obsessed about, all of this of course. And so, Holman Hunt wants to make everything right. He had a vulgar, new-rich villa in, I think it was Maida Vale, ‘cause that’s where kept women were frequently kept at the time. And Ruskin, who reviewed this at length said everything is so correctly hideous, tastelessness of the interior, particularly the ugliness, the fatal ugliness of the Rosewood piano, is how he put it. And every detail is running home the message she is seeing the light. We know that 'cause we can see it reflected behind her in the large, vulgar plate glass mirror, which would’ve been a definite must in any new-rich house of this period. He is singing a song. We can read the song “Oft in the Stilly Night.” And that’s what triggers her conscience. She remembers it from her childhood. We see the evil cat playing with a bird as the horrible man is playing with her. We know that he’s a cad, actually, by his facial hair.

I recommend you this wonderful book I’m reading at the moment, Kathryn Hughes about Victorian Bodies. And she’s got a whole chapter on Victorian men’s facial hair. I strongly recommend it. It’s fascinating and very, very funny too, actually. And so, but I could go on and on and on. I mean, I could actually talk for half an hour in telling you what every single detail, including even the pattern on the wallpaper, means with regard to the story of this picture. But I won’t. I’m going to skip that one. This is Hireling Shepherd Again, so Victorian, this picture. Not a very good reproduction, I’m afraid. I think it must’ve been taken from a book. You need to see the original of this. It is an extraordinary picture. And again, nobody today, unless they’re told, would know that this is a picture about the worries of the Church of England. There was all these big controversies between high church and low church. Do you have smells and bells? Do you have even Latin? Do you have robes and ceremony? Or do you keep it plain and simple and direct contact with God? And so, this is a metaphor that Hireling Shepherd, he’s the priest or the vicar who’s concerned with vain things. He’s holding a moth, that symbols the silliness really of what he’s concerned with. And because he’s so seduced by this, he’s allowing his flock, you can see the sheep are wandering into the cornfield. And you must never let sheep do that 'cause they’re very silly and they eat themselves to death. As you probably know from “Far from the Madding Crowd.” It is a completely astonishing, again, I don’t know if I really think it’s beautiful or not, it’s astonishing.

This is probably the Holman Hunt I look at most often 'cause it’s in London, and it’s mesmerising. What can I say? This was painted for the Royal Academy of 1852. And he originally called it. Well, it’s not enough for Holman Hunt to just paint a picture of sheep and a coast, the Southwest of England. It’s got to have some meaning. And 1852, Emperor Louis Napoleon had declared France the Empire, second Empire. The Brits had a complete fit. Thinking, “Oh my god, the French "are up to that no good again, we’ll be invaded.” And there was enormous fuss in the newspapers that the coasts of England were not sufficiently protected. So he called this picture Our English Coast. And the idea is you go and you say, lovely sheep, beautiful sunlight, wonderful coast. Oh my God. And this is our English coast and the French are just the other side of that water. And they’re going to be invading us before you can say whatever. So then, actually the picture didn’t sell. And Louis Napoleon of course never turned out to be an enemy of the British. He was allied with the British. And so no threat. And 1855, the first Paris World exhibition, Holman Hunt was invited to send something. And he had this and he wanted to send it. And he thought, well, I can’t send it with that title. So he changed the title to Stray Sheep. So instead of being a picture about the French threat to the South coast of England, becomes a picture about, well, the same theme really. As the awakening conscience of Christians who strayed from the path of virtue. But it is so amazing this picture. When you see the way he’s painted the sunlight.

Animals’ ears are sort of transparent. And you can see all the veins in the ear as the sun is shining through the transparent ear. And also well ahead of the Impressionists. He’s very aware that shadow in sunlight is coloured. It’s full of purple and blue, and so on. It’s usually the Impressionists are thought to be the first people to depict this. So he’s mad. What can you say? He’s completely bonkers. William Holman Hunt, obsessive. They’re all a bit obsessive, but he’s the worst. And he decides, he’s very, very religious, and he wants to paint things that are truthful and right. This obsession with getting things right. So he feels that all the pictures of Jesus, and the New Testament, and the Bible that have been painted in Europe, they’re all wrong because nobody’s been there. So he goes there, he spends years in what is now Israel, or in that area. And the result is this picture. This gave him a lot of trouble ‘cause he wanted to make sure, he said, “I want to paint the people of the Bible. "I want to paint real Jews.” And there were Jews in what is now Israel in the 19th Century, there was a Jewish community. I’m sure Trudy’s talked to you about it many times. But they were very suspicious and very hostile towards him. And they wouldn’t pose for him. And in fact he had to enlist the help of Sir Moses Montefiore, who was doing a lot of charitable work for Jewish communities in Jerusalem, to persuade them to pose for this picture. And even then, there was nobody who was allowed, no Jew would pose for Jesus. So he had to bend the rules there. And the boy who who posed for Jesus in this picture was Italian and not Jewish. And this picture, I think probably I should end on this picture 'cause what, anyway, it’s hard act to follow, such a crazy picture.

There are two versions of it. And it took him years to paint it. And the madness of it, that he went down to the Dead Sea. At that time, it wasn’t a lovely resort like it is today. It was pretty inhospitable place. And he tethered up a goat. And he got through five goats that died of sunstroke while he was in his Pre-Raphaelite laborious, mad way, painting the goat hair by hair. And he sat with a rifle across his knees because he needed to protect himself against a marauding Arab tribesman who lived in the area. Apparently, a couple of times they thundered up on their horses, took one look at this mad Englishman in the midday sun, and galloped off again. And this is a reconstruction in his back garden, back in England many, many years later, of his equipment, and gear, and clothing that he used in order to paint the scapegoat. So I’ve run out of time. And I can see there are questions, so I’m going to end here.

Q&A and Comments:

William Etty, thank you.

Yes, it’s true, Sir Joshua renamed Sir Sloshua.

Q: Which are examples of the post-Raphaelite artists which dislike?

A: Everybody, they didn’t like anybody after Raphael. They thought it was all downhill.

Q: Is there any connection between Pre-Raphaelites and the arts and craft movement?

A: Yes, there is. And I’ll be talking about that next time. Maybe both happened after the Pre-Raphaelites.

I’m not sure what you’re referring to there. Arlene, I’m glad you, I love that show at the Tate. Anybody in England, do go and see it. It’s a great show. Well selected, I think. Right, yes.

Q: Why was there so much ?

A: Well, because it was new. And it was, anything new in 1848 was suspect because it could be revolutionary. And also people disliked the excessive realism. They thought it was distasteful of those paintings. And there was the Catholic suspicion of Catholicism. So those are the three main reasons I would say.

In the painting when Isabella is in a mournful state in this dining room scene, there are many characters gathered around the table. Mourning woman, a mourning woman. Yeah, it’s a fantastic picture. What can I say? Christ in his father’s workshop is in the Tate London. I think it’s up at the moment.

Good. Enjoy, Margaret. Nick Cave’s video Where the Wild Roses Grow. I remember once taking somebody round a Pre-Raphaelite show, this is now 30 years ago, or more. And Michael Palin followed me round, listening in. I’ve always regretted, I didn’t actually just say to him, well, why didn’t you just join my group? But the Monty Python people were very keen on the Pre-Raphaelites.

But this is Bernard who thinks that they’re dead. No feeling of movement compared to the Impressionists. Yeah, a real backwater. There are still people who think that. I don’t agree with you at all. And I will certainly be strongly arguing for their importance and influence in my next lecture.

Annulled, thank you. Another word that didn’t come to me.

Yes, I think the Queen did receive Effie, but it was too late. I mean, this was right at the end of the century, at the end of their lives.

Colours are really extraordinary, aren’t they? Well, I always think Millais is the one that colours are thrilling. Whereas Holman Hunt, mm, sometimes they’re very shrill. It can really seem like a dentist drill, the colour equivalent. There is a version of it in St. Paul’s Cathedral and there is a version in Oxford. And there’s a third version, I dunno, where it is. Thank you very much.

Completely bonkers, yes. Well, thank you very much indeed.

Millais, yes, Millais, he’s not, I mean, the accepted view of him was that after he stopped being a Pre-Raphaelite, it was all kitsch and rubbish. But I don’t think that’s true. I think there are later paintings that are impressive, but never quite on the same level as his early Pre-Raphaelite things.

Thank you very much. Very nice to get your positive response. I never, I haven’t watched TV in this century. Actually I haven’t watched TV in probably 40 years. So I remember reading about, apparently it was very sensational. But I don’t know. I think their lives were quite sensational. Ford Madox Brown. Yeah, I’m afraid he fell off the end because I talked too long. But right, thank you all very much. And I’m onto the second kind of Pre-Raphaelite-ism. The Rossetti, Burne-Jones type. I’ll be talking about that on Wednesday.