The pre-Raphaelites (Part II):

Romantics at work

Gwen Herat

ART: They were the Romantics. It was as if the Brotherhood looked at the world with eyes closed; as if a livelier emerald twinkled in the grass or a pure sapphire melted in the sea. Nature appeared to thrust before their dilated pupils and every floating prismatic ray sweeping the forest, carpeted in variegate light and shadow.

They were not simply birds and branches above but ostensibly the scenes of seduction. Take a closer look at Holman Hunt’s Hireling Shepherd, it vividly gives the intricacies of the majesty of implications. Or for that matter, Millais’s Ophelia which is a calculated dazzle the spectre by stamen.

The exquisite details of this famous painting not only catapulted Millais but the full embodiment of a Shakespearean character. One might argue that Millais in selecting Ophelia as his subject rejected many a theory of a shallow pond as we see Ophelia floating, whether dead or alive, only to have been known as the artist recorded her death, found in Hamlet. It was at a point beyond representation but shone with a feverish clarity.

Radicalism

The pre-Raphaelites who were born into a romantic age which was also an age of strange intensity. The narrow limits within which the human emotions were circumscribed by propriety of movements, availed themselves to a wide compass.

However, the libidinous conception of society with which the vicissitudes of emotion and pang as well as a degree of ecstasy and anguish, envisaged their work. The undiscovered joy and power blossomed through their unromantic society but later, more grandiose imagery rose from poems, when they sought the august nature that bound them all.

Ruskin’s radicalism trailed in the wake of such painters like Coubert and for a fleeting moment the spirit of Coubert was manifest in the English art. However, there was a state of uncertainty and a swerving conviction that the fittest of all artists would depend on their passion and ardour.

Such were the distinctive features and the moral atmosphere of the Pre-Raphaelites as they exalted the breath through softing of their art.

Despite the moral warning, it is to be noted the lyrical wickedness in Holman Hunt’s Hireling Shepherd and the awe in his Awakened Conscience.

In contrast, Millais who had a passion for Shakespeare characters, gave a demonic appearance to Ferdinand with Ariel’s allure beyond the limits of any ordinary Fairyland.

Cynical standards of behaviour had to be restricted especially by Millais who often opted the Bard as his muse. It was the same constriction that inspired Millais’s Waiting as well as the Ghost. Millais also displayed sharp picture of material spectre and then again his uncommon field of experience when he drew Retribution.

A complexed artist one might say but power and brilliance for display, placed him ahead of his colleagues. For instance, Retribution reveals the fateful intrusion upon a husband and his innocent young wife as a discarded women who entreat support for her children. Millais had the power of feel to look at life justifiably and essence of tragedy in life’s sufferings.

Pre-Raphaelites could have adopted Coburt’s extreme posture to convey through the images of motherless children abandoned by drunken fathers in a state of dilapidation conveyed the family life.

Though few were masters of their times, the rest too recoiled from the contemporary exhaustion that were apparent in most of the early paintings.

The price which they attached with other idealists at the time, to romantic desire, were such that no obstacles were felt. The mystic and tragic were proof against sobering effects as most of the artists tried to portray their concepts from figures rather than from nature.

William Holman Hunt

London born, William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) was typical of British painters, highly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites as critics saw him weighed down by their elaborations.

But Hunt never wavered as he continued his art with this set theme. One of his paintings, The Awakening Conscience bears witness to this.

Intended as a material counterpart but in actual life and in manner which the appeal of the spirit of love abandoned. Hunt confessed that he was originally impressed by an incident from David Copperfield to bring out the intensity of emotion.

The Hireling Shepherd which hangs in the Manchester Art Gallery, painted in 1852 has the following quotation:

‘Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd,

The sheep in the corn.

And for one blast of thy minkin mouth

The sheep shall take no harm.’

When Hunt painted this popular painting in 1851 at Ewell near Surbiton where Millais was painting Ophelia, none of the painters had an inkling that these two paintings were going to be internationally spectacular. Both painters were in this Brotherhood.

British Museum

Hunts’s first picture with a moral was intended to be ‘a rebuke to the secretarian vanities and vital negligence of the day. He painted the shepherd as though some type of pastor who instead of performing sacred services to his flock, discussed vain questions of no value to human soul.

While he feeds her lambs with sour apples, his sheep have burst bounds and got into the corn. So highly-charged was the moral of this painting, he became one of the foremost masters of his time. It even superceded Ophelia.

As a young man, Hunt worked for many years as a clerk to an estate agent while studying at the British Museum and the National Gallery.

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

In 1844, he entered the RA schools. In 1848 together with Millais and Rossetti, founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He visited Palestine for the first time in 1854 in order to paint scenes from the life of Christ in accordance with principles of absolute historical and archaeological accuracy. Earlier, Wilkie and Tissot had visited Palestine with the same purpose and Hunt visited this holy city again in 1873.

Right through life, Hunt remained fiercely faithful to the theories of the Pre-Raphaelites and he understood them while he expounded them in his memoirs and published in London in 1905. His latest pictures were fully detailed in them.

The most prolific of the lot, very intensed in painting in any medium, all his paintings hang around in the leading art galleries in the world.

Millais is better known for Shakespearean characters and apart from them his pen and ink drawings were spectacular in accuracy and style.

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