V1.B.P5.1. THE Pre-Raphaelites /My story

I cannot postpone it anymore... I have to write about them before the excitement fades into memory. Yet, I think I will write about them in detail, in pieces...

As for my impression of them, they were gorgeous as well as scary! They took my breath away but I still can't imagine how much detail is detailed enough to prove Raphael did it the wrong way... -he most certainly did nothing "wrong", not in my opinion!-

Let's see... My story with the Pre-Raphaelites dates back to a solitary early-summer night. I was obsessed with a song Başak has sent me (Cemetry Gates by the Smiths) while reading a collection of Irish plays by Yeats, Synge and O'Casey I found in Eric's book collection. Cathleen ni Houlihan was worth spending some time on even for an outsider to Irish culture as myself, so I started to wiki Abbey Theatre and Yeats, as well as Keats and Wilde... Through a long journey that follows lines of loves, hates and passions of these people -sometimes in a circular fashion- I came to know the P-Rs. (Yeats had an affair with novelist Olivia Shakespear whose daughter Dorothy was the wife of Ezra Pound, who claimed that Yeats was "the only poet worthy of serious study". According to wiki, Ezra's early poetry was influenced by his reading of the Pre-Raphaelites. He started to write in an archaicly poetic language influenced by Ford Madox Ford, who was the grandson of Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. Although Brown was never a member of the P-R brotherhood, he is considered within the genre -see below). Then I remembered that long long loooong time ago, when I knew nothing and cared even less about art, I was taken to Tate Britain by Mark, and I was so overwhelmed by the sheer size of the collection that I decided to concentrate on one single painting: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Damsel of the Sanct Grael (i.e. the Holy Grail). This is curious because this painting is supposed to be owned by Andrew Lloyd Weber. Maybe it was on an exhibition by then, or maybe I remember it wrongly. Rossetti obviously enjoyed painting similar women in similar fashion...

So I learned a bit about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, although Christoph regarded as too dull for his taste, and figured some relations out: Rossetti was a pupil of Ford Madox Brown. He had met Hunt after seeing Hunt's painting "The Eve of St Agnes", based on Keats' poem.
The brotherhood was initiated by John Everett Millais (yes!!! all his work is great, particularly Ophelia, for which -according to a gossip I heard- his model got sick as she had to pose in water and he refused to pay the medical bills claiming it was an occupational risk she took, but my personal favourites also include Mariana and The Carpenter's Shop -despite all the sheep and particularly due to Charles Dickens' accusation of it for making "the Holy Family look like alcoholics and slum-dwellers, adopting contorted and absurd 'medieval' poses". One other reason for my amusement is that in Victoria and Albert Museum I saw what he could paint when he was 16: Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru. It was hard to grasp how one can paint like that at that age...), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (yesss!!! and yayy!!! for all that passion more than the perfection) and William Holman Hunt (with all due respect, no, thanks. paints too much sheep for my taste, plus too many conservative values in themes), and later included William Michael Rossetti (Dante Gabriel Rossetti's brother, he published a journal rather than painting I believe), Thomas Woolner (no idea), James Collinson (no comment!) and Frederic George Stephens (nothing to tell, really... I would much prefer Arthur Hughes as a part of the Brotherhood merely for the sake of April Love). Ford Madox Brown (yess and wow! he is absolutely brilliant, my personal favourite being The Last of England) was invited to join, but preferred to remain independent.

The Brotherhood was founded upon these four principles:

1. To have genuine ideas to express; (both Rossetti and Millais were accused of blasphemy for their early paintings on religious themes. Yet, my favourite "idea" is one that was almost painted by Brown: Take your Son, Sir! Pity he did not finish it.)
2. To study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them; (goes well with John Ruskin's ideas on art-see On Art and Life, John Ruskin 1853/1859. The Brotherhood was supported by Ruskin both financially and in his critiques.)
   
3. To sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote; (details, details, and more details... I cannot believe that they have actually painted tens of sheep in such a detailed fashion! Or check Millais' Ophelia for how detailed flowers can be painted.)
   
4. And, most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.

Their love life interested me, as their models were continuously appearing in different paintings. Among themselves Hunt and Woolner married three sisters, Effie Gray moved from Ruskin to Millais, and Rossetti idealised his wife Elizabeth Siddal's image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as Beata Beatrix (while Millais painted her in Ophelia). More to come on that as well as weird links to Darwin, Byron, Dante, Nabakov, Tennyson, and Lewis Carroll...