Pre-Raphaelite Painting and Nineteenth-Century Realism (review)

As a general rule, revisionist scholarship on literary or art movements seeks to disprove the established claim that a particular movement was consistently organized around a core commitment or program, some common aesthetic denominator supposedly discernable in all (or at least all major) texts belonging to the group. Texts that do not comfortably fit the mold—say, George Eliot’s supernatural novella The Lifted Veil, penned by a major Victorian realist writer—may be regarded as anomalies that, as such, do not jeopardize the argument for unity and uniformity. The revision typically challenges this understanding by making much of such neglected (or deliberately ignored) sites of inconsistency and dissent, arguing that what earlier critics deemed anomalous or marginal in the history of the movement is in fact central to it, in the sense that it makes all generalizations extremely problematic. Once this kind of revision becomes, as it often does, the dominant critical paradigm, it is unlikely to be challenged by counter-arguments that risk appearing methodologically old-fashioned and theoretically regressive. One is tempted to describe this irreversible fracturing of conceptual and aesthetic wholes as a sort of Humpty-Dumpty phenomenon: once broken, the movement cannot be put back together again.

This has been the fate of the Pre-Raphaelites, a group of British artists who in 1848 joined to form a “Brotherhood” with the aim of countering what they regarded as the decline of contemporary British art into conventional sentimentality, a lamentable lapse into bland, formulaic visual statements devoid of genuine feeling and artistic merit. The movement was reactionary from its inception, and its aesthetics of dissent was soon formalized in a series of published articles. According to the Brotherhood’s secretary and chief spokesperson for Pre-Raphaelite cause, William Michael Rossetti, the key figures of the movement—his brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Ford Maddox Brown—agreed from the start on a number of important practical and theoretical issues, most significantly the rule that they should paint directly from nature and strive for absolute fidelity to the facts of the visible world. They would observe and record nature with an “innocent eye,” as John Ruskin, the great patron of the Pre-Raphaelites, liked to put it. But a quick glance at Pre-Raphaelite art gives the impression that each member of the fraternity took this injunction to mean something entirely different, so that as a result there are as many visions of the world from the viewpoint of “innocence” as there are observers and artists. One would have to look very hard indeed to make a convincing case for a shared aesthetics in such Pre-Raphaelite paintings as Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience, Brown’s Work, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Astarte Syriaca. The differences, on the other hand, are striking, and it seems inevitable to conclude that, no matter what the Pre-Raphaelites thought and said they were trying to accomplish together, their art shows very few traces of fraternal like-mindedness. As Timothy Hilton wrote in 1970, “to look for a common purpose in the Pre-Raphaelite painters, their admirers and followers, is to look in vain. They were thoroughly individual, and generally kept their own individuality. One would never mistake the work of one member of the Brotherhood for that of another. Pre-Raphaelitism cannot be defined; it was too various.”¹ The last three decades have not seen this notion seriously challenged. The Pre-Raphaelite Humpty-Dumpty could not be put back together again simply because, according to general opinion, it was never whole to begin with.

Marcia Werner’s Pre-Raphaelite Painting and Nineteenth-Century Realism offers a timely, thoughtful, and impressively researched rebuttal of this dominant view. Critics of Hilton’s persuasion, Werner contends, were simply wrong; Pre-Raphaelitism can be defined: it was from its inception a coherent and consistent art movement and remained so for a number of years. In the first part of her book, Werner carefully examines...