Pre-Raphaelites

Millais wanted to paint his Ophelia floating in the river, her face turned toward the sky, her hands half-extended at the surface of the water, opened as if giving a blessing, her body half-stuck in grasses, dead willow leaves, nettles, daisies, and buttercups, her dress and draperies ballooning, slowly losing the lightness that had suspended them at the surface, everything that had been the young woman disappearing beneath the low foliage and the straight reeds, slowly flowing away with the water towards some great river and towards death.

The paintings by Hunt and Millais were hung in prominent places, and the painters were congratulated by many of the people in attendance on the morning of the private view. Their realism did not shock the audience at all, The Times was benevolent, and the professors of the Royal Academy were moderate in their criticism. No one had noticed the mysterious letters P.R.B on Isabel’s chair, a visible sign of the conspiracy. The Pre-Raphaelites found buyers immediately, which is a sign of predestination in England as it is elsewhere.

It was Rossetti, Hunt, and Millais who had challenged official art. It was they who had to wage the battle and, given their limited resources, either emerge victorious or disappear.

Seven of the young painters of the day had the right to call themselves P.R.B. Three talented men, even ones as gifted as Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti, cannot make as much noise as one hundred mediocre ones, and they accepted four other Pre-Raphaelite brothers: Michael William Rossetti, who did not paint; Woolner, who did not paint either, but sculpted sometimes; Stephens, who ended up confining himself entirely to literature; and Collinson, who after having tried in vain to paint Elisabeth of Hungary, converted to Catholicism and entered a seminary.

The practical and ambitious Millais needed a theory to set him apart from the crowd of skilful painters and was unconcerned with believing or prophesying. They set to work.

These three friends were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais. All three of them had great natural abilities and a furious desire to succeed, and this trio made a perfect whole. Hunt had faith, Rossetti eloquence, and Millais talent. The Italian was more poetic, Millais was more of a painter, and Hunt was more Christian. Rossetti, anxious and agitated, needed to prophesy something, anything, to anyone who came along. The conscientious Hunt needed to believe in something and devote himself to a great cause.

The Bluidie Tryst

Joseph Noel Paton, 1855

Oil on canvas, 73 x 65 cm

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

this art, there is only the most meticulous, thorough imitation of nature possible, and the naive expression of religious ideas. Look at the expression of this horse! And see how this hermit prays with all his heart! And what colour should all this be? It should have the colours of van Eyck’s work, fresh and brilliant! Colours applied directly to a white canvas...

This was the state of affairs in England when, one evening in the year 1848, three young painters who worked in the same studio were taking tea at the home of the most wealthy among them. One was of Italian origin and the other two were English, and they were friends in the same way as sailors who set sail together and depend upon one another for help. They were thumbing through a collection of engravings by Campo Santo de Pise that lay on the table.

All of the winding paths in his historical promenade brought them inevitably to the same point, which was the social mission of art and its supremacy over all other things.