Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at the Ashmolean review – a glimpse into the world beyond their most famous paintings
I had always assumed that everyone loved the Pre-Raphaelites. In my mind, the strength of my teenage obsession (hopping on the tube to Tate Britain used to be one of the better reasons I skipped school) surely meant that everyone had a similar fixation. How could you not like their bright colours, literary allusions, and somewhat overwrought medievalism? But the truth is – with their preoccupation with moribund women, Shakespearean narratives, and the more cloying aspects of Tennyson’s Victoriana – many people find the Brotherhood too clever by half and too cliched by a whole.
The exhibition “Pre-Raphaelite Drawings and Watercolours” at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum goes some way to alter these perceptions. Away from the gallery’s exhibition halls is the Western Art Print Room; this exhibition displays many of the museums’ rarely seen and fragile holdings usually reserved for academics and scholars. The exhibition opens with a ghostly, monochrome chalk drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Jane Morris’ creamy skin and dark hair are all the more shocking and emotive in this near-ethereal drawing than the later painting it is a sketch towards.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848. In a year of many political revolutions and upheaval, seven young artists, including Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt, decided to stage a revolution of their own. Their rebellion was initially against the formal, academic strictures of the Royal Academy of Arts. Still, as the movement and brotherhood progressed, it came to stand for a rebellion against all mid-century Victorian social mores, fashions, and expectations.
The artistic radicalism is felt strongly in some parts of the exhibition. Rossetti’s drawings of Elizabeth Siddal, Jane Morris, and Fanny Cornforth have a bodily solidity and reality that is distinctly divorced from the “grand style” Joshua Reynolds popularised the century before. The sketches and drawings better reveal this ideological aspect of the Brotherhood; away from the block-buster effects of chromatic colour, Rossetti’s pen-and-ink dedication to the lumps on Cornforth’s neck feels all the more touchingly immediate and real.
But the radicalism can be overstated; the Ashmolean exhibition – for some unknown reason – hangs the landscapes of George Price Boyce in pride of place. It is difficult to see what is ideologically radical or even aesthetically interesting, about another small painting of a barn. And, perhaps in a bid to fill the exhibition rooms, the boundaries of Pre-Raphaelite art are pushed: whilst it is possible to see Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (who painted in the twentieth century) as the ‘last’ Pre-Raphaelite, it is more difficult to see the movement’s influence on the watercolour drawing of Mary and Jesus the Ashmolean includes.
It is important to take the Brotherhood’s stated aims of anti-idealising with a pinch of salt. This exhibition – and, indeed, most exhibitions of these artists – is marked by a persistent, reoccurring female form of a long neck, strong chin, and sharp cheekbones. At points, it is difficult to distinguish between Rossetti’s different models (and lovers); Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris. Their different hair provides some clue, but their enlarged, down-cast eyes and prominent brows – whilst striking – are so similar that they reveal more about Rossetti’s preferences than promoting some radical, counter-cultural beauty standards.
Last year, there was an exhibition of the Pre-Raphaelite Sisters at the National Portrait Gallery – a bid to show the women of the movement beyond tortured Ophelias, idealised Beatrices, and seductive Lilliths. The art of Elizabeth Siddal, Effie Millais, Jane Morris, Fanny Cornforth provides an alternative to the relentless male gaze of the brotherhood. The Ashmolean does not display any of the women’s paintings but does have a handful of drawings by Siddal. Her Two Men in a Boat and a Woman Punting is both a playful retort to Rossetti’s ‘Boatmen and Siren’ and a brilliant drawing in its own right. The sense of movement on the page feels preternaturally modern and at odds with the perfectly passive female figures it is surrounded by.
The Brotherhood had distinctly literary predilections: when founded at Oxford, they rated writers from Chaucer to Tennyson on a system of ‘stars’. The more famous literary paintings – Millais’ Ophelia or Marina – are not included in this exhibition, but in their place are several other literary works. Rossetti’s pen and ink drawing of a tortured Lady Macbeth is far more harrowing than any beautiful medieval maiden, and Edward Burne-Jones manuscript pages for William Morris’s Kelmscott Press are a riot of delicate detail.
Perhaps the most absorbing artwork in the exhibition is Burne-Jones’s The Knight’s Farewell; barely bigger than a postcard, it is so intricate that even to look at it for an hour would not be enough. The chance to see these rarer, smaller works should not just be framed in terms of sketches or preparatory materials for the more famous paintings. Their existence pays homage to a wholesale artistic worldview: a commitment to drawing, design, and resurgent medievalism that saw the founding of a new printing press, attempts at resurrecting old artistic techniques, and a whole world of dedicated detail beyond the more famous paintings.
It has long been recognised that the Bloomsbury Group – with their similarly overlapping lovers – was an artistic and literary movement beyond one genre; the clothes of the Omega workshop are not considered lesser than, or utterly divorced from, the paintings of Vanessa Bell. The Ashmolean exhibition makes way for a similarly critical attitude to the Pre-Raphaelites. There is a world beyond their most famous paintings; a world of William Morris wallpaper-radicalism, intimate pen-and-ink drawings, and touching watercolours that should not be ignored in favour of their more famous works.