Pre-Raphaelite Painting

The paper offers a reconsideration of an early piece from Burne-Jones’s productive oeuvre, The Prioress’s Tale Wardrobe, a collaborative venture between the artist, William Morris and Philip Webb. Contesting the dominant narrative of the piece as a wedding gift to Morris and having been inspired by the Renaissance Italian cassone-tradition, the object is explored within a new dynamic of exchange – that of Italian Renaissance altarpieces and Burne-Jones’s own projects of religious panels.

The Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) conceived the subject of The Mirror of Venus between 1865 and 1867. He painted two versions: a small version in gouache and oil and a larger version in oil on canvas. In composing this subject Burne-Jones was inspired by the poetic and chromatic description of a lyrical stanza on “The Hill of Venus” in the long epic poem Earthly Paradise, written by his close friend and collaborator William Morris.  This study comprises three parts: Burne-Jones’s history of the paintings, his iconographical sources, and an iconological interpretation of The Mirror of Venus.

The Caroline Miller Parker Collection of the Work of Walter Crane at Harvard University is one of the largest and most important collections of material by and related to the English artist Walter Crane (1845–1915). This essay offers a first account of the scope of the collection, a preliminary analysis of how it was formed, and brief descriptions of some of its highlights.

La place du rêve dans l'oeuvre d'Edward Burne-Jones et sa réception critique Le mouvement préraphaélite naquit en 1848 en Angleterre. Son histoire est tout aussi complexe que passionnante. Ce courant artistique se voulut novateur, et pour renouveler un art considéré comme sclérosé, se tourna, entre autres, vers le passé. Dans la lignée du romantisme et de la mode du néo-gothique, les pré-raphaélites s'inspiraient largement du Moyen Age. Après ses premiers pas au début des années 1850, le mouvement connut du succès en « seconde généra-tion préraphaélite » qui se forma, à partir de 1856, autour de Dante Gabriel Ros-setti. L'un des acteurs principaux de ce retour des préraphaélites fut un jeune artiste originaire de Birmingham, qui devint l'un des plus grands noms de la peinture anglaise: Edward Burne-Jones. Le catalogue de l'une des rétrospectives qui suivirent la mort de Burne-Jones en 1899 s'ouvrait sur une citation qui permet de mieux comprendre son ap-proche artistique:

This essay examines Dickens’s growing interest in art beginning around 1844, an interest, it argues, that was informed largely by his Italian sojourn (July 1844 to June 1845). The trip provided Dickens the experience, insight, context, and critical eye by which to appraise art. Pictures from Italy, along with letters written during Dickens’s Italian journey, reveal expansive, insightful, and sustained reflections on art. It also offers an important window into Dickens’s anti-Roman Catholic bigotry, fetishized in his attitude to Italy. Using John Everett Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (1850), Dickens’s review of it in Household Words (15 June 1850), and working backwards historically to Pictures from Italy (1846), this paper argues that Dickens’s early views of the Pre-Raphaelites manifest a hostility to their Christology, exacerbated if not formed altogether in Italy. In Millais, it is not the picture of labor, the entire family involved in work, which troubled Dickens. What bothered him was the disorder and chaos of the place, the ordinariness or plainness of the representation, and the physical deformity of the figures. That the Holy Family would be depicted as working class was also disquieting. The essay contextualizes the Millais painting with John Rogers Herbert’s The Youth of Our Lord (1847) and Holman Hunt’s The Shadow of Death (1870–73) to show that all three paintings represent not only a radical shift in the tradition in art (realism and naturalism) but a shift also in the Christology.

William Powell Frith’s A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881 (1883) shows visitors reading and annotating their Exhibition Catalogues, capturing for posterity the presence of reading material at the Summer Exhibitions during the Victorian era. Sculptures, watercolours, oil paintings, miniatures, engravings, and architectural drawings on display were numbered but not captioned, so catalogues were necessary to identify them. They mediated access to art through minimal information: the name of the artist, the artwork number, title, and location in the gallery. Also included was a list of exhibitors with their address for prospective purchasers to contact them directly as the Royal Academy did not broker sales. This minimal information highlights the Academy’s willingness to let art speak for itself but some artists chose to include literary quotations in the catalogue to accompany their exhibits. The 1853 catalogue includes a total of 102 quotations taken from the Scriptures, poems, plays, and novels, mostly in English but some in French and Italian. Why did artists choose to caption their artworks with literary quotations and not prose descriptions? How did these quotations impact visitors’ interpretation of art? How did they enhance the aesthetics of the artworks they accompanied? An overview of the uses to which dramatic and poetic quotations were put in the 1853 Exhibition Catalogue begins to answer these questions, and can suggest ways to think about the relationship between literary and visual cultures at the Summer Exhibitions.

Pre-Rafaelit Kız Kardeşliği, Kadın Ressamlar ve İlham Perileri başlıklı bu çalışmanın amacı 19. yüzyılın İngiltere'sinde Viktorya döneminde avangard bir akım olarak ortaya çıkan Pre-Rafaelitizm'in gelişmesinde kadınların rolünün altını çizmek olacaktır. Pre-Rafaelit Kardeşliği her ne kadar geleneksel erkek egemen tutumla kurulmuş olsa da otoriteye başkaldırması ve bunun akabinde dışlanması bakımından dönemin kadın hareketleriyle kader ortaklığı içindedir. Bu çalışma Pre-Rafaelitizmin yüzyılın sonuna dek dönemsel form ve içerik değişimini izleyerek, kadın sanatçıların sosyal hak ve özgürlük arayışlarındaki siyasi ve estetik stratejilerinin bu akım içinde nasıl şekillendiğini görünür kılmayı hedeflemektedir.

Fin de siècle was the  period of  triumph of the Pre-Raphaelite painting which gave birth to many motifs which became popular then. Similarities extended beyond formal features. Comparison of paintings by John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt with works by Stanisław Wyspiański and Leon Wyczółkowski reveals similar attitude towards historical subject which was considerably different from academic tradition.