Secret Life of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Secret Life of Books

While walking through the Pre-Raphaelite Gallery at Tate Britain, Sophie and Jonty record an impromptu exploration of the mid-Victorian art m

Key takeaways

• The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded by four students at the Royal Academy: Rossetti, Ford Maddox Brown, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais.
• John Everett Millais's painting 'Christ and the House of His Parents' caused a scandal for depicting holy figures with the dirty, realistic features of working-class models.

Main topics

• Origins of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
• Connection between visual art and English literature

Notable quotes

Before Raphael spoiled everything.

Conclusion

The episode offers a compelling look at how the Pre-Raphaelites used l

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) Sophie, we're standing on the threshold of the Pre-Raphaelite Gallery at Tate Britain in London, aren't we? Speaker 1 (0:08) It's tremendously exciting. We did a pre-lap, we pre-gamed by doing a quick round of it and we were so excited that we just whipped out our recording equipment and decided to do an impromptu episode. Speaker 2 (0:19) And what's so fascinating about the Pre-Raphaelites is it is an artistic movement that emerges in the mid-19th century, and we'll do some background on it in a moment, in London. It's a visual art movement, but it is completely entwined with literature from the very outset. The artists who make up the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its successors are all acquainted with writers like Dickens. A lot of the paintings are responding to literary subjects. And indeed, some of the artists themselves are also writers like... Gabrielle Dante Rossetti. Speaker 1 (0:54) Exactly. And of course Rossetti's house on Cheney Walk, which we spoke about in our Christina Rossetti episode, was an absolute hub for a kind of artistic literary set in mid-19th century London. It was the home of the beloved Womibato top. Speaker 1 (1:14) But so much more than that. The other thing that really struck me as we were doing a round of this room is that the Pre-Raphaelites are this kind of fascinating bridge between the aesthetic movement of Oscar Wilde and his circle and the very much pre-Victorian kind of art being produced by William Hogarth and that kind of style of the narrative painting or the conversation painting set in a city. And we think of Hogarth as being a kind of... one-off British artists, but you really see the influence on the Pre-Raphaelites. So Speaker 2 (1:44) let's get into what the movement is and how it's formed. Tell Speaker 1 (1:48) us about the movement. Speaker 2 (1:49) So there are four young men studying at the Royal Academy in the late 1840s. There's Rossetti, who we mentioned earlier, Ford Maddox Brown, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais. Now, one of the first things we see when we come to the room is this very early photograph. It's 1848, so photography has only just been invented. It's a photograph of a huge protest happening in Kennington Common in 1848 for the so-called Charterist Meeting, Charterist Petition to Parliament. It had been signed by over five million people and it was demanding democracy for working people. So it's a huge moment in British history of working class mass gathering. And in fact, it's incredible. There's a photograph of it. You can make out the people standing there. For these young men at the Royal Academy, they formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood a few months afterwards. And it's also 1848 is the year of revolutions across Europe. And they are as excitable young men asking what a revolution in art might be. How are they going to escape from the stuffiness of the Royal Academy? How are they going to embody the energy of these revolutions and uprisings happening all over Europe? Now, what they do... doesn't necessarily make immediate sense because if you imagine young radical artists you start thinking of Picasso and explosive movements like cubism what the pre-raphaelites do is they say when was the last time we think art was really good yeah when was the last time we think art was you know not just a bourgeois activity it wasn't just kind of painting for rich people when was it last a movement where artists were studying nature closely. And they say that was in the early days of the Renaissance, before Raphael in the 1500s. Speaker 1 (3:38) Before Raphael spoiled everything. So Speaker 2 (3:39) they start studying the early Italian Renaissance painters before Raphael, hence being called the Pre-Raphaelites. They Speaker 1 (3:47) called themselves, it was their own name that they gave themselves, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Speaker 2 (3:51) That's right. And they had a lot of very silly schoolboy jokes about, you know... what does PRB stand for? They wanted people to speculate. They knew it was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but they joked it might stand for Penis Rather Better. Ho, ho, ho. This is actually one of their jokes. Now, the painting we're now looking at is probably the first great definitive statement of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. And it's a painting by John Everett Millais called Christ and the House of His Parents. And as you can see, it's painted in what we would call a... a hyper-realist style, almost a sort of photographic realist style. The colour's Speaker 1 (4:29) incredibly heightened. The gestures that the figures are making are sort of exaggerated. The way that the Joseph figure leans over the carpenter's table is very pronounced. The mother and daughter make this kind of hyper-intimate scene. The glances of the other people in the room are... exaggerated, so almost chiaroscuro. Yes. Chiaroscuro. And Speaker 2 (4:52) Millais asks himself the question, you know, what would the childhood of Christ actually have been like? This is a subject that's been covered endlessly in paintings, you know, through the Baroque period of art in Italy, and it becomes more and more elaborate over the centuries of art making. And Millais says, actually, if we're to get back to the basics... They wouldn't have had a glamorous place. It would have been a very, very simple carpenter's shop. And that's what he creates here in the background by studying real carpentry shops. He says the family themselves would have not had aristocratic features. And so he drew for his models. He drew upon working people. And he allows them to be dirty. If you look at this little boy here, who's... Speaker 1 (5:37) He's got a sort of scrap of fur around his middle. And Speaker 2 (5:40) is sort of rather intimidated by his peer, who is the young Christ. He looks very fearful of him, actually, and he's got dirty knees. The young Christ himself has dirty toes. And so this painting caused a complete scandal when it was first exhibited. Critics said it was blasphemous. It was showing the most holy of subjects as being the squalid, sordid. dirty scene. And in fact, several... You know who Speaker 1 (6:04) led the charge of the protests? It was Dickens. Speaker 2 (6:06) It was Dickens himself. Yes. Dickens Speaker 1 (6:08) didn't like it. Which I actually find really surprising. It must have been that Dickensian thing of like, someone's on my turf. Yes. It's my, you know, I'm the guy who goes into the squalid working classes. Like Speaker 2 (6:19) when he pretended he hadn't read Jane Eyre. Yes, exactly. It's a real Speaker 1 (6:22) tell. When Dickens gets really hit up about something, it means that he's pissed that someone else stole his idea. Speaker 2 (6:28) The other thing the Pre-Raphaelites start doing is turning to English literature for inspiration. They want to do paintings that are responding to the works of English literature they love. And because they're the Pre-Raphaelites, they're looking back to the 1300s, 1400s. It's no accident, Sophie, that a popular subject becomes Chaucer. Speaker 1 (6:49) Yes, because he is, of course... the father of English literature. And the reason that Chaucer is thought of as the father of English literature, right from the Canterbury Tales, but also Troilus and Crusade that we did a couple of weeks ago, is that he was writing in the vernacular. He was writing in ordinary Middle English instead of in Latin or French or one of the other elevated kind of intercontinental languages that he... would have known from his work, because as we've said about Chaucer, he was extremely cosmopolitan and travelled frequently between England and the continent. But what we're now looking at is a painting by Ford Maddox Brown, who is connected to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but he's in some ways was thought of as the most Hogarthian of the Pre-Raphaelites. And you can really see it in this image. It's a painting called Chaucer at the Court of Edward III. So it's sort of... the poet as the inspiration and the great