Patrick Bade
The Pre-Raphaelite Revolution, Part 2

Patrick Bade - The Pre-Raphaelite Revolution, Part 2

- Now, as I said last week, there are two very different types of pre-Raphaelitism. There is the pre-Raphaelitism of Millais and Holman Hunt with its obsessive truth to nature, its engagement with the real world and the here and now, and there is a second type of pre-Raphaelitism that was created by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and developed by Edward Burne-Jones, which in many ways is the opposite. It escapes from the real world. It tends to be stylized and quite unrealistic, and it explores a dim, distant, it has a dim, distant, nostalgic view of the past. So we’ve got Holman Hunt here on the left hand side and Burne-Jones on the right. So I’m going to go back to that fateful year of 1848 when the three students bonded together to form the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Millais, Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and this is the first work by Rossetti in this new pre-Raphaelite style. He was trying very hard, I think, to paint like his two friends, with very minute detail, everything painted from life. The subject is the girlhood of the Virgin Mary, and he used his sister, the poetess Christina Rossetti, as a model for the Virgin, and his mother for Virgin Mary’s mother, St. Anne. But there is something very clumsy, almost amateurish about this picture, and it’s very clear that he doesn’t have the technical skills of his two friends, and that he has problems with perspective. You can see that if you look at the floor. The lines don’t converge quite as they should do towards the vanishing point, and he resorts to a tactic that 15th century Italian and Flemish artists used when they weren’t really sure of their perspective, which is to put a barrier across the middle of the picture that divides the foreground from the distance, it runs along the middle ground.

So this picture was not well received when it was first exhibited, and his next picture was received with even more hostility and puzzlement. Now, one of the comments at the end of the last session was from somebody who said that he thought that the pre-Raphaelites were second rate and provincial and nothing compared with the impressionists, and that was, I suppose, quite a common view for a long time. Certainly in the 1950s and ‘60s, things began to change. Around the time when I was a student at the Courtauld, people began to reexamine the pre-Raphaelites, particularly Rossetti, I would say, and to see him as a revolutionary and an important figure in early modern art. Now, I think you could, however astonishing some of the pictures I showed you last time of Millais and Holman Hunt, I think one could say that that type of pre-Raphaelitism, with its obsessive truth to nature was a dead end. It wasn’t really going to go anywhere. I think you could actually say exactly the same of impressionism in its original form, with its concentration on sensory perception. I think all the artists involved in impressionism, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, and so on, came to feel by about 1880 that impressionism was a bit of a dead end, and there needed to be ways to move forward and to escape from a trap that they’d fallen into. Now with this picture, it shows the very traditional subject of the annunciation. It’s still painted in this very minute, very smooth technique, but it’s as though he, he certainly had problems with perspective. He actually went to Ford Maddox Brown for lessons, but he found it boring and he was very impatient.

And it’s as though in this picture he’s saying, “Well, perspective, I can’t do it. I can’t be bothered with it. I’m going to just abandon it all together.” Now, this was one of the key things, I would say, of early modernism, not just in England, but actually even more so in France, was to question Renaissance perspective, the way that artists had seen the world since the 15th century, the way they constructed space in their pictures. So in this picture, you can see, if you look at the background and the transition from the floor to the wall, there is no perspective, and the space is very, very compressed. Another way in which this picture also shows concerns of early modernism is in its use of colour. Rossetti in his letters referred to it as the “Blessed white eyesore,” but it’s very clear that he’s using a sort of harmony of white on white. The colour is being used here for symbolic and expressive rather than representational reasons. My teacher, my Doctor Vater at the Courtauld Institute in the early 1970s, that’s Alan Bowness, he used to claim that this picture is the direct ancestor of Malevich’s “White on White,” and that is not such a farfetched claim, actually. And I would point to Kandinsky’s very important essay published in 1909, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” who claims Rossetti and Burne-Jones as very important forerunners of the new spiritual and abstract art that he was pioneering. Interestingly, Kandinsky sees two strands coming into modern art, one from impressionism, but particularly the late impressionism of Monet, which you could say that Monet, the Monet of the “Haystacks,” for instance, is as different from the impressionism of the 1870s as the art I’m looking at today is from the original version of pre-Raphaelitism.

This was the third attempt by Rossetti at an oil painting in the manner of the early pre-Raphaelites, with very, very precise rendition of the real world, and it’s his one and only attempt at engagement with contemporary reality in the manner of Holeman Hunt and Millais. It’s called “Found,” and it was begun in 1854, but he found the picture absolutely impossible to complete. He got completely exasperated with the need to paint every detail from life. It tells a story. It’s a rather moralising picture. It’s a common story of the 19th century of a girl from the countryside who comes up to London and she falls into prostitution. And one day, I suppose around dawn, at the end of a hard night’s work for her, she bumps into her former fiance from the country who’s come up to sell the calf you see on the right-hand side. But the task of painting the moss-covered wall that the woman is collapsing against, the hay in the cart, and above all, the calf, the calf drives him absolutely mad because he wouldn’t stay still when he’s desperately trying to paint it hair by hair in a pre-Raphaelite manner. So as I said, he was never able to finish this picture despite coming back to it on several occasions later in his career. And after this, he just turns his back on this type of pre-Raphaelitism, and moves into something totally different, small scale works that are painted in watercolour and wash, like this painting, which the title, which is “The Wedding of St. George and Princess Sabra.” So he is fascinated by the Middle Ages, medievalism, of course, that’s a very Victorian thing. But this picture, again, there’s no attempt whatsoever to render in inverted commas, “realistic space.”

Everything is very flattened, everything is very stylized, everything is very abstracted. There’s a very strong sense of surface pattern. And I would say that that is a key feature of early modernism in which he’s a really a major pioneer, is the increasing emphasis on the flatness of the picture surface. We see this with the impressionists, we see it with the post-impressionists, we see it, of course, with Gauguin, and through into artists like Mondrian and Kandinsky and so on. The other aspect of this picture, which is highly original, is that it doesn’t really have any kind of narrative. We saw Millais experimenting with this kind of mood picture briefly in the mid to late 1850s. So it’s a painting which is meant to affect you, really, as a piece of music does. It just conjures up a mood of love and tenderness and nostalgia. And of course, it’s not a coincidence that you see music being played in the background on those bells, that in this whole series of pictures, music plays a very important role, and it was an influential theory in the second half of 19th century. Walter Pater, for instance, said, “All art should aspire to the condition of music,” and that art should not be moralising, it should not be telling a story. It should speak to your emotions in the way that music does. Here is another gouache of the same period with all the same features. This one’s called “The Blue Closet,” and there’s even less of a narrative here 'cause there’s no story being told. It’s just these beautiful young women playing music. And again, everything stylized, everything flattened, with this very strong emphasis on pattern. Now, this is a work of 1853, and it’s inspired by the life of the great mediaeval poet Dante.

Now, Rossetti’s father was a Dante scholar. Rossetti grew up very familiar with the work of Dante, and his name, of course, he was named Dante Gabriel Rossetti, although in life, everybody called him Gabriel. They didn’t call him Dante. But he clearly identified with the mediaeval poet, and throughout his life, the women that he fell in love with, the women that he loved, and he idolised, he identified them with Dante’s great love for Beatrice. But there’s, with all the pre-Raphaelites, with Morris as well, and Burne-Jones, and Rossetti, you’re never really sure whether life is inspiring art or art is inspiring life. So this picture shows Rossetti after the death, on the anniversary of the death of Beatrice, making a portrait of her. So this is 1853. This is before Rossetti had even met Lizzie Siddal, who he later so strongly identified with Beatrice. And we’ll see how this picture anticipates events in their lives. Now, here is Lizzie Siddal. For a long time, it was believed that no photographs of her had survived because Rossetti didn’t want them to. He felt that photographs didn’t do any kind of justice to her beauty. But this photograph you see on the left-hand side was discovered, that gives us some idea of what she looked like. She did indeed have this long neck, and these rather broad shoulders, and she had very beautiful reddish hair. Of course, what we can’t get from the photograph or Rossetti’s drawings is the beauty of her colouring, her copper coloured hair and her slate grey eyes.

Here is a drawing of her by Rossetti. She was discovered, as I mentioned last week, by another artist called Walter Deverell, who happened to be accompanying his mother into a hat shop of Leicester Square. Of course, no woman, as I’ve mentioned before, in the Victorian period, could go out really without a male escort. And while in the shop, he was very taken by her beauty, which was really the ideal of the pre-Raphaelites, these heavy-lidded eyes and this melancholy air, and actually a slightly androgynous look to her, with a strong chin and these big shoulders and the long neck. So it must have been a very awkward moment, but through the intermediary of his mother, he asked if she would pose for him, and she agreed to do this. And it was through Deverell that she then met Rossetti. It’s always said that the best likeness of her was actually by Millais, and I told you that story last week about how Millais borrowed Lizzie from Rossetti and posed her in a bath in a night dress for his painting of Ophelia. And in the painting of Ophelia, we do actually get some sense of what her colouring was like, the slate, blue eyes, the copper hair, the very white skin, and the high colour of the cheeks. But there are countless drawings of her by Rossetti. She clearly became something of an obsession.

She was his model and they were partners for years before they actually married. In fact, they only married very shortly, well, a year or so before her death, and it was often a rather troubled relationship. But these drawings of Lizzie are certainly amongst the most beautiful things, I think, that Rossetti ever did. They’re incredibly haunting and fascinating, with a strong sense of melancholia and even depression, in that drawing, for instance, the way that she turns away from the light. So under his guidance, she took up art. And this is a very charming drawing by Rossetti of Lizzie drawing a portrait of Rossetti himself. She has traditionally been dismissed as very amateur and rather incompetent as an artist. She’s certainly working very much in his manner, and if he is quite clumsy, she is much more clumsy. But if you go to the Rossetti show at the Tate, they make a very strong argument for her originality as an artist. And they suggest that, in fact, she came up with many ideas as an artist that he borrowed rather than the other way around. Here are two works by Lizzie Siddal. This is a picture at the end of, so for me, the most wonderful things by Rossetti date from that period in the middle of the 1850s. This dates from 1859, and it marks a turning point in his work. It’s his first return to the medium of oil, and it’s an important new model who comes into his life and his career called Fanny Cornforth. And all this time, of course, he’s still in the middle of his relationship with Lizzie, but clearly not faithful to her, and he was sleeping with Fanny Cornforth, who was, I suppose, a woman of easy virtue, as would’ve been defined by the Victorians anyway, and she was also sleeping with a friend of his, an artist friend of his called George Boyce, and rather bizarrely, it was Boyce, I mean, this seems to have been a comfortably accepted situation by all three of them, that she was modelling for the two artists and sleeping with both of them, and Boyce commissioned Rossetti to paint this picture, which is the called “Bocca Bachata” meaning the kissed mouth.

I mentioned last week this book, and I’ve got it here beside me, that I’m still reading, absolutely fascinating book called “Victorians Undone” by Kathryn Hughes, and there is a whole chapter on this picture in the book, in which she gives a highly sexualized interpretation of this picture. She suggests there are all sorts of hints of oral sex and other things in this picture. I leave it to you to read the book and decide whether you agree with all of that or not, but it’s certainly a picture of troubling sensuality, physicality, a kind of sensuousness and physicality, which you don’t find in the pictures by Rossetti inspired by Lizzie Siddal. And certainly, when he showed it to his friends at Morris’, Ruskin was absolutely horrified. He regarded it as positively pornographic. Remember, this is the time when the female nude was completely absent or more or less banned from the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, so this painting is not nude, clearly, but it’s got a sensuality that is maybe more sexy and disturbing than if she were nude. And certainly, Swinburne, the decadent poet Swinburne, found it very, very exciting indeed. So finally, Rossetti marries Lizzie, and they move in together into his apartment in Chatham Place by London Bridge, and she becomes pregnant, and she has a baby, and the baby dies, and she suffered from very severe postnatal depression. And the recipe for that, or the remedy for that in the 19th century was laudanum.

Laudanum is, of course, a solution of opium, and she became addicted to it, and it made her health and her depression far worse, and she went into a decline. And she eventually died from an overdose, possibly suicide. We’re not really quite sure. Different versions of what happened were told by Rossetti’s friends rather gleefully. One version went around that she was very depressed and he was going out to do a lecture in a working men’s club, and she begged him not to go, and he insisted on going, and she said, “Well, if you go, I’ll take more laudanum,” and he apparently threw the bottle at her and said, “Take the lot and see if I care.” So when he came back, she had taken the laudanum, and she was dying and he was desperate. He desperately tried to save her, called six different doctors, but they were unable to save her. And of course, he was appallingly guilty about this. He went into the most terrible depression. He never went back to that apartment at Chatham Place. And famously, through a sense of guilt, and wanting to punish himself, he buried all his poetry, his unpublished poetry. Got to mention, of course, he’s a very important poet rather like Blake, he’s one of those English artists who’s equally important as a poet as as a painter. So he buried his unpublished poems wrapped in her gorgeous red hair in a coffin in Highgate Cemetery.

And the macabre follow up to that is that seven years later, he wanted to publish the poems, but the only copies were in the coffin, so he had to get special permission from the Home Office to have her grave opened. He wasn’t actually present at the time. Other people did it for him, but in the middle of the night with flaming torches, they wrenched open the coffin. Her face had been eaten away, but her gorgeous hair was still intact, and it didn’t want to give up the poems. They had to cut the hair to get the poems out, and there was still hair in the book of poems when it was given to him. And unsurprisingly, of course, this prompted a huge crisis of guilt. And from this time, Rossetti plunged into alcoholism and drug addiction that would eventually kill him in 1883. Now, this picture, to me, if I had to choose one picture by Rossetti, I would say that this is the outstanding masterpiece, if only because of its enormous impact and influence on later artists. It’s probable that it was actually begun before Lizzie’s death. So it’s another case of, you know, art and life, really, which comes first? Sort of chicken and egg situation. And it shows the death of Beatrice, Dante’s Beatrice, with whom Rossetti, of course, identified Lizzy, and it’s a kind of Liebestod, it’s a love death. You could compare it with the nearly contemporary opera, very contemporary opera of Wagner, “Tristan and Isolde.” So it’s the moment of Beatrice’s death, but it’s also a moment of ecstasy. Her eyes are closed and her lips are parted in ecstasy, and there is a very direct reference, of course, to Lizzie’s death because the dove is dropping a poppy into her outstretched hands, a poppy from which the opium comes that killed her.

And then there’s sort of aureole around her head, and through a kind of opium haze, we see a view of Florence and the Ponte Vecchio, and we see in the background, in the haze, a figure of Dante and a figure representing love. This picture was the first picture by Rossetti to go into a public collection in the early 1890s, after his death. It was shown at the National Gallery. Oh, first of all, let me make a slightly macabre, but I think a very interesting comparison. Here are two great 19th century artists memorialising the deaths of their wives in very, very different ways. On the left is Monet’s painting of his wife Camille. She died a slow and agonising death just a few years later in 1878. And there’s a letter where he describes, and of course, in the 19th century, when a close relative died, normally you would sit, there would be a vigil, you’d sit beside their body through the night and he sat beside her body. And then he said he was almost shocked at himself, but through a kind of compulsion, he had a compulsion to pick up his paint and to paint the corpse of this woman that he’d loved and lived with for so many years, just as though she wore a haystack or a snow landscape. As I said, the “Beata Beatrix” was shown at the National Gallery from the early 1890s, and it was much reproduced, and it’s one of those cases where it’s an image like a pebble being dropped into a pond. There are so many repercussions from it, ripples, and so many key masterpieces of the late 19th century were inspired by it. First of all, Klimt here, the same idea of the mixture of love and death, even more macabre here, with the Biblical story of Judith and Holofernes.

You have the very pre-Raphaelite, strong-jawed, long neck, the aureole of hair, the head thrown back, the eyes semi-closed, the lips parted in ecstasy. And another very famous key image, of course, which I think is also directly inspired by “Beata Beatrix” is Munch’s “Madonna,” a mildly blasphemous title, anyway, considering what’s being represented here. Once again, it’s a Liebestod, it’s a love death. It’s the moment, it’s the orgasm, it’s the moment of ecstasy, it’s the moment of conception, but, of course, the foetus that’s conceived is also a kind of death figure, the bottom left-hand side. And in the border, you have decoratively the sperm cells that are leading to the pregnancy of the female figure. On a slightly irreverent note, this is Mucha, Alphonse Mucha, the Czech Parisian art nouveau artist, and this is a commercial image. It’s a poster for Job cigarettes. And I used to think quite often of this image, you know, when, back, I suppose, at the end of the 20th century, when it became impossible for people to smoke anymore in their work situations, and you would see secretaries standing outside the office building. I remember that that was the case at Christie’s, taking the first drag on their cigarette and throwing their heads back with a look of ecstasy, and that is, of course, what we have here on the right-hand side. Now, notice the hair in both these pictures. Hair is very, very important for Rossetti. He was a notorious hair fetishist. He’d be in trouble today because when walking down the street, you’d be chatting with him, he was a very gregarious, very charming man, and he would see a woman with hair that appealed to him, and he would break off in mid conversation and just walk off following the woman, fascinated by her hair. And what is this hair fetishism so strong with Rossetti and so prevalent?

I mean, he’s a pioneer, I suppose, but in the following generation, up to the early 1900s, women’s hair, there was this ob obsession with it, in fantasy Ekler art, hair that becomes, it’s almost got a life of its own, hasn’t it? In the Mucha on the right-hand side with these tendril-like patterns. My theory about it is that it’s partly to do with the fact that in the 19th century, you would never see a respectable woman with her hair loose. The only person who would ever see a woman with her hair undone and loose was in a moment of intimacy, really, when you are having sex with her, otherwise, hair was always tied up. It was plaited, it was tied up in a bun, it was in a net or whatever. So I think quite a lot of men in the late 19th century, the image of a woman’s hair like this, this is a Rossetti, this is a bit earlier, this is from the from that great period in the 1850s, that would’ve been a tremendously erotically charged image. And just some other examples of late 19th century hair fetishes, and this is the Dutch symbolist artist Toorop, where you sort of feel, oh my goodness, women’s hair is taking over the world in this picture. And Munch, there are so many images of Munch where you can see that a woman’s hair is a weapon, it’s a weapon of seduction, and sometimes destruction of the male. And famous literary examples of hair fetishism, are “Pelléas and Mélisande,” either the play of Maeterlinck Melan or the Debussy opera, a famous scene where Mélisande leans out of the castle tower and her hair falls over Pelléas, and he literally goes completely crazy with ecstasy at her hair falling around him. And another Belgian playwright shows Rodenbach, his play, “Bruges-la-Morte” also turned into an opera, “Die Tote Statd” by Korngold, which some of you may have seen recently at the English National Opera, where the hero of the opera keeps the hair of his dead wife as a memento in a glass case, and eventually strangles his mistress, or at least we think he does, or he thinks he does, with the hair of his dead wife.

So the hair fetishism of Rossetti, again, another example, “Lilith” on the right-hand side, and became notorious. And there are lots of caricatures in “Punch” and so on. This is a “Punch” caricature on the left-hand side of a Rossetti picture with the woman’s hair getting completely out of hand. But although he is a pioneer of all of this, he’s the one who really gets this going, it’s followed up by many other artists, and not just British artists. Degas late in his career would sometimes hire models just to, for hours on end, watching them combing their hair. Now, in 1857, Rossetti received a commission to paint murals in the Oxford Union. And Rossetti was, as I said, he was very gregarious, and he was one of those people, he loved company, and he liked being a leader. He liked influencing other people. And he’d gathered around him a whole group of young aspiring artists, including Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, who you see here in these two images. They had no formal training whatsoever. Burne-Jones had actually aspired to enter the church, and Morris worked in an architect’s office, and neither of them had ever trained at the Royal Academy. So they had even less formal training than Rossetti had. But he didn’t believe in that. He believed in inherent talent and instinct. And he said to them, “Oh, forget what you’re doing. Forget being in an architect’s office. Come with me and we’ll paint murals in the Oxford Union.” Even though, of course, they had no idea what they were doing from a technical point of view, they had no idea of the techniques of painting directly on a wall of fresco. So they all went up there in 1857. They had a very jolly time painting these murals directly on the wall. They almost immediately started to deteriorate. They’re still there, but they’re hard to see. They’re in a very poor state, as you can see.

But one of the important consequences of that trip was they went to theatre one night in Oxford, and they saw this 17-year-old girl, working class girl called Jane Burden, very humble origins. Her father was an osler who couldn’t even read and write. She was, by the standard of the time, rather odd looking. She was very tall. She had this columnar neck that they liked so much, this rather masculine, strong chin, big, big shoulders. So I’m quite sure that nobody had ever told her she was pretty, but suddenly, she was surrounded by these young men who fell on their knees and told her she was a goddess. Must have been really quite a disconcerting experience for her, and she becomes, of course, the muse of Rossetti’s later work. You could say the two most important models are the Lizzie Siddal for the 1850s, but from 1870s or ‘60s and '70s, it’s Jane. Here are two later works by Rossetti inspired by Jane. It was Morris who, at this time, of course, Rossetti is still married to Lizzie or still in a relationship with Lizzie, and it was actually Morris who fell in love with her and proposed to her. Now, this must have been, again, an astonishing thing for her. A girl from extremely poor background. Morris came from a very wealthy bourgeois family who owned tin mines in Cornwall. So she married him, but eventually, she was in this rather bizarre menage a trois with Rossetti, who was clearly besotted with her and obsessed with her, and in love with her. Rossetti and Morris bought Kelmscott Manor that you see here in the Cotswolds, and they had a kind of cox and box arrangement that Morris was always going off on his travels to collect Icelandic sagas or whatever, and whenever he was away, Rossetti would move in, and when Morris came back, Rossetti would move out.

We have plenty of photographs of Jane, because Rossetti took them and sometimes his pictures are based on them, so we know what she looked like, and astonishingly, she really looked like Rossetti’s pictures. But to go back to 1857, as I said, here is the teenage Jane, and Morris, a rather inhibited, uptight Englishman, very different from the more flamboyant, outgoing Rossetti, and the story is that she agreed to pose for him. He painted this picture. This is the only completed picture, and he soon discovered, of course, that his talent was not for painting, it was for design. And I think you can probably see that already in this picture with the wonderful patent fabrics in this picture. He’s painting her here as Guinevere, or Isolde. We are not sure which one of the two legendary heroins, mediaeval heroins. But apparently, on one occasion, he was painting her, presumably not this picture, as it’s completed, and became so frustrated that he picked up a brush, and he wrote, painted across the unfinished picture, “I cannot paint you, but I love you,” and he turned the picture around and that was how he proposed to her, which is a lovely romantic story, but of course, things didn’t turn out quite as you might have wished. They remain married for the rest of his life. She outlived him by some time. And this is a caricature by Rossetti of the “Ms at Ems.” Ems was a watering place, a spa in Germany. And so here is Jane in the bath, drinking the health-giving waters and looking rather bored, as Morris, he’s got up to volume two of his endless narrative poem, “The Earthly Paradise.” Well before Kelmscott House, Kelmscott Manor, rather, when when they first married, it was a, I suppose, socially, it was a tricky situation because, as I said, she was from very, very humble origins, and it was not so easy in the 19th century to marry across class barriers.

So many people think that he built the Red House as a sort of refuge from the rest of the world, as a sort of ideal place for his new young wife. And she, of course, they entertained artists all the time, she was rarely heard to say anything. My guess is, you know how English people are, the way they judge one another the moment they open their mouths. George Bernard Shaw said that the moment an Englishman opens his mouth, another Englishman despises him. And he was part of this circle, and he commented that the only words that he’d ever heard Jane Morris say were to ask somebody if they wanted more rice pudding. My guess is she was terrified of opening her mouth because of her working class accent. But this house, designed by his architect friend Philip Webb, I’ve talked about it in the context of Victorian architecture, its enormous importance, really, in the early history of modern architecture. And the fact that when he came to furnish it, he couldn’t find anything in the shops that he liked, so he got all his friends, Philip Webb, Maddox Brown, Burne-Jones, and Morris himself, of course, they all designed and made everything to go into at the house, and this is really the beginning of the arts and crafts movement, which also was very important in the early history of modern architecture and design. Now, this is the wedding present that Burne-Jones gave to Morris, and it’s a cupboard, as you can see, that’s painted. It’s with an illustration to Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” that both Morris and Burne-Jones were fascinated by.

And it shows the prioress’ tale. Well, I’m quite sure that Trudy, in probably in many of her lectures, has referred to this ‘cause it’s the most notorious piece of literary antisemitism in the English Middle Ages. A horrible story, actually, about a Christian child who’s kidnapped and murdered by Jews, and that keeps singing after it’s died. And then the Virgin comes and puts the host on his tongue, and, you know, you think why? What possessed Burne-Jones or Morris to think that this was a suitable image for the bedroom in their new house? My guess is that, in a way, the antisemitism here was not something that was at the front of their minds. They liked the sort of magical, mystical elements in the story rather than showcasing the antisemitism. This, of course, out of the house and the efforts to furnish it, they developed the firm of Morris and Co, and Burne-Jones and very much involved in this. This is a room they designed as a tea room. In the V&A, you can still see that. And of course, it will be another lecture on the arts and crafts movement and the work of William Morris, the fabric designs, the wallpaper, the furniture, and so on. And of course, the printing. This is the Kelmscott Chaucer. Very important too in the revival of the book as an art form, looking really back to mediaeval, illuminated manuscripts with the border, the illustration, and the text all as one visual unity. Now, I’ve only left myself about 15 minutes for Burne-Jones, an artist that I really love and am very fascinated by. He was born in Birmingham in the 1830s, at the height of the Industrial Revolution. His father was a very modest picture framer, not wealthy at all, but eked a living.

His mother died in childbirth. His father was so grief stricken that for a year or so he couldn’t even bring himself to look at or touch the child, although they later did form quite a close bond. Now, Birmingham in the 1830s, Birmingham was the first great industrial centre in the world. Remember, Britain pioneered Industrial Revolution. Birmingham was capitalism at its most brutal, and cruel, completely untrammelled capitalism. Of course we have people on both sides of the Atlantic who are quite keen to go back to that, but it was a terrible, terrible place. And of course, no healthcare, no public schools. I mean, it was squalled and appalling, appalling exploitation, poverty, a truly, truly dreadful place. And I always say about Burne-Jones, so I have to be careful with English audiences 'cause sometimes people get upset with me for saying this, but I think the whole of Burne-Jones’ art throughout his whole life was inspired by a desire to make a world as unlike Birmingham as possible, to escape from this horrible favela, squalid townscape of Birmingham. This is a caricature he made of himself that I think really underlines that point. It shows him trying to enter one of his own pictures. So he, as I said, he had no formal training whatsoever, and he began really just by imitating Rossetti, he hero worshipped Rossetti. Here is a Rossetti illustration from the “Moxon Tennyson” on the right-hand side, and there is a very early drawing by Burne-Jones, and you can see the obvious similarity between the two.

Now, the striking thing is that, eventually, I would say that Burne-Jones becomes incomparably technically more adept and sophisticated than his mentor. Rossetti once said about Burne-Jones, he called him Ned, he said, “Ned is the laziest man I know ‘cause when he sits down to work, he’s too lazy to get up again.” And his wife, Georgina Burne-Jones, she also described how he would work just obsessively night and day. He could not stop drawing, and eventually becomes an absolutely wonderful draughtsman. This is a picture dating from the end of the 1860s. It’s called the “Le Chant d'Amour,” and so it really follows on from those gouaches of Rossetti that I showed you earlier in that it’s a painting without a narrative, without a story. It’s an evocation of the Middle Ages, and it’s a mood. It’s an evocation of the mood, and again, you’ve got this very important musical element in the picture. And in a certain way, it’s really quite abstract with a very strong sense of flat pattern. The other thing about it, when you consider its date, 1868, he is the embodiment in English art of fin de siècle. Fin de siècle means end of the century. It has this connotations of decadence, exhaustion, sickness, perversity. It’s all there in this picture. And androgyny, that’s another very key thing with the fin de siècle, androgyny. Blurring of the sexes, of course, all very much in the news at the moment, with all this big transgender fuss. This might be my favourite painting by Burne-Jones.

It’s in the Jones Collection at the V&A, and a wonderful collection of painting, and if you go there, you’ll probably find you’re in a room all alone with it 'cause not many people know about it. And there are many other wonderful paintings in that collection. So it’s called “The Mill,” which gives you no help whatsoever in trying to work out what is happening in this picture. Where is this happening? When is it happening? It’s in some kind of timeless place. You know, the architecture, what kind of architecture is that? Is it mediaeval? Is it ancient? Is it modern? What kind of dress are they wearing? What period does that come from? And what is going on? You have this very androgynous figure, is it male or female, on the right-hand side, playing an instrument, and this strange young lady performing a very slow dance. The woman in the middle giving us a rather unnerving stare. And what the hell is going on in the background? You’ve got this strange city where, I mean, try, imagine walking around this city. There’s, you know, staircases and corridors that seem to lead to nowhere. This is dated 1871. That’s the year, of course, that Monet and Pissarro were in London to escape the Franco Prussian war. So it’s strange to think this picture was being painted, is exactly contemporary with Pissarro. Of course, Pissarro, setting up his easel at Crystal Palace, and just trying to get down what his eye sees straight in front of him. So a very, very opposite, really, approach, I think.

And yes, the architecture in the background, as I said, it’s vaguely mediaeval or even ancient, but also with these strange volumes and abstracted shapes, it looks forward to the architecture of early modernism or Boise and Macintosh. And did I talk about what’s going on in the background here? What is going on there with these young men who are taking their clothes off, the one in the middle there, they seem to be, I think they’re ignudi from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, who have somehow, they’re having a day off from Sistine Chapel and there going for a swim in this rather dank canal. So here is Burne-Jones’ caricature of himself in his studio, and he said many times that what he really wanted to do was to paint murals. And in fact, apart from designing some mosaics, he never really did this, but his pictures, his later pictures are very big, and so they’re mural sized, and they’re often mural format as well, and this is something he shares with quite a lot of fantasy Ekler artists, symbolist artists, painting these very elongated frieze-like pictures. So Burne-Jones at the top, and Hugo DeShavan underneath. This is Burne-Jones at the top, Seurat underneath, and Munch, his frieze of life. Munch, as I’ve suggested, an artist strongly influenced by the pre-Raphaelitel, and Gauguin, the largest picture that Gauguin painted. Again, a picture dealing with great, mysterious philosophical themes, a picture without a narrative. So I think I’m going to skip these. Oh, this is just to make the point of, again, about the androgyny. This is Gustave Moreau, St. George rescuing the princess. You could swap the heads of St. George and the princess and not know the difference.

So great sexual ambiguity in these pictures. And this theme that I’ve been mentioning several times in this lecture, this emphasis on picture surface, on flatness. If you go to the V&A and you get down on your knees and you look up at the picture, or you look at the picture at an angle, you’ll see that the paint surface is all textured, rather like a textured wallpaper. And Burne-Jones once said, “If all my paintings were destroyed and somebody just picked up a fragment,” like the fragment you see here, “And couldn’t recognise what is represented, I’d still like them to think that they would recognise that this was a beautiful picture, without recognising the subject.” That’s a very, very interesting idea, rather important idea. And as I said, I think this moved towards abstraction. At the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, the pre-Raphaelites played an important role. Now, Burne-Jones’ breakthrough to international fame came in 1889, when he was asked to exhibit at the Paris World Fair. This is the Paris, of course, of the Eiffel Tower, and he sent this picture, “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid,” and it took Paris by storm. In fact, it took the world by storm. And I would say from 1889, for nearly a decade, Burne-Jones was one of the most famous and one of the most influential artists in the world. And for many people, many Parisians, the symbolist poets and artists, they loved this picture because it actually was a kind, they saw it as a kind of repast or answer to the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower represented aggressive modernism, progress, industry, all that, and the Burne-Jones represented the desire to escape from all of that. It does have a sort of a narrative. It’s an ancient Persian legend of a king who falls in love with a beggar maid.

You’d think she’d be happy. She doesn’t look all that happy. She looks unwell, I would say. Her body language is very tense, her face, if you look at it closely, do I have a, no I don’t, has the, you know, what you might call heroin chic in fashion shoots today. She’s got very bruised looking eyes, very unhealthy palor. So Burne-Jones, he wanted to create, as I said, a real world that’s completely, no, an ideal world that’s completely separate from the real world. He wants to make sure that actually this doesn’t belong in any historical period, so he went to enormous trouble to design. He went to the study armour at the British Museum and the Tower of London. He designed his own very fantasy Ekler, rather art nouveau armour that’s not like armour of any period. He was very concerned about her dress, and there’s a letter where he says, “There must be rags. They’ve got to look like a poor girl could wear them,” but they’ve got to be, as he put it, “Perfectly beautiful rags,” and I think he really brought that one off. I mean, these are rags that you could wear to the Oscars. Somebody should try that actually, turn up on the red carpet at the Oscars wearing this dress. The other thing is this, again, this fantasy Ekler of exhaustion, tiredness, and it was certainly part of his character. His wife Georgiana talks about him suffering from this terrible lethargy. And in his caricatures of himself, he always shows himself looking pretty exhausted and depressed. And I think I’m going to finish with this image, which is the ultimate Burne-Jones of the “Briar Rose” series. Well, have I got yes, the “Briar Rose” series where everybody, apart from the knight on the left-hand side, everybody has dropped off into a deep slumber, and even he doesn’t look all that wide awake. He looks like he might quite keel over into a deep sleep as well. So I’m going to see what you’ve got to say.

Q&A and Comments:

“Maryanne’s arm in the Annunciation is almost like a comic book.” I’m not sure about that. I’ll have another look.

Q: He was christened Gabriel Dante, was it that way around? And he changed the order of the two names.

A: Yeah, although he didn’t use the name Dante. Being flattened because it doesn’t attempt to create a sense of recession. Doesn’t want to think, you know, traditionally, since of the Renaissance, the perspective is used to make you think you could actually walk into the picture.

Well, you can’t walk into a picture by Rossetti ‘cause there’s no sense of recession. Full title of the book I talked about is “Victorians Undone.” Thank you, Daphne. Thank you very much.

Q: Do I think Frida Kahlo took inspiration from the Klimt painting?

A: Not sure that Frida Kahlo would’ve known Klimt. You know, Klimt didn’t have that kind of fame during her lifetime. Klimt’s fame is quite a recent thing.

Q: “Do you know whether any woman wore short hair?”

A: I think it’s very, no, I don’t think women really start to wear short hair till around the time of the First World War. No, it was very unusual. You wouldn’t have, I think it would’ve been, even working class women would’ve had long hair in the 19th century. Well, 'cause the whole thing of the 1920s, you could say it’s partly a backlash against this fetish. It was also to do with the fact that during the First World War, women had been required to do men’s work, and long hair got in the way. And I think it was also very much a kind of sign of women wanting to show their independence. It was often a very shocking gesture for a bourgeois family if a young woman cut her hair off.

Yes, Birmingham Art Gallery has one of the great collections of pre-Raphaelite paintings, particularly Burne-Jones.

Q: “What do the birds in the paintings symbolise?”

A: Well, different things in different paintings. I don’t think you can say they always symbolise the same thing. Prioress at Dawn is a very naive unworldly person.

Yes, I think Chaucer is quite mocking towards the prioress, isn’t he? So even Chaucer’s attitude towards the antisemitism of the story is quite ambiguous, but that’s a lecture in itself.

Thank you, Jennifer. Burne-Jones, I’m glad, Karen, that you like Burne-Jones. He’s an artist who fascinates me. Mucha at the Prague Municipal House. Thank you for that. If anybody’s going there, you should catch that. Well, it doesn’t. Yes, of course, there is a narrative because it’s the wedding of St. George, and you rightly point out the dragon’s head there, but it doesn’t, the narrative is very subdued in that picture. It’s not like a typical Victorian painting where there would be much more of a storytelling element. Thank you very much, Greta.

That’s Debbie. Do I have time for this, really? I think, the thing about the impressionists feeling they reached the dead end, yet you read the letters of Renoir, I mean he expresses it very, very clearly that he felt it was a dead end, and so did Pissarro, and I don’t think there are any letters by Monet saying that explicitly, but he clearly felt he had to move on. It was too limiting just to paint what the eye sees.

And another letter which says it very explicitly is a letter that Gauguin wrote in the winter of 1884, where he says, “Yes, yes, it’s all very well what the impressionists do, but is it enough?” We’ve got to move on from that. There’s a very famous letter of Gauguin, which I think you’ll to his friend Schuffenecker that I think you’ll find.

Thank you, Jerry, very, very kind, and everybody who’s making nice comments. Well, the reason I omit Van Gogh from the impressionist is he wasn’t an impressionist. Yes, you are quite right, he is a post-impressionist. He, of course was very keen on English art, knew a lot about it. He lived in England, but that’s a another lecture entirely.

I have talked about Van Gogh for lockdown. I’m always happy to talk about him. He’s such an amazing artist and such an inspiration, so no doubt, I’ll come back to him again at some point.

Thank you all very, very much for your patience and your kind comments, and we’ll move on to an artist, a very different stamp, next time, Jack the Ripper. We put the question in, not Jack the Ripper, I mean Sickert, was he Jack the Ripper? No, I don’t think he was Jack the Ripper. That’s a very daft idea, but we thought we put that in the title.

• [Host] Thank you very much Patrick.

• Thank you, thank you very much.