The Magazine Antiques

By Jonathan Lopez  |  

In 1841 the English art critic and social theorist John Ruskin hired a young valet by the name of John Hobbs. For the sake of propriety Ruskin resolved to address Hobbs as “George,” on the principle that a Victorian gentleman, even one with advanced political beliefs, should not have to share his name with a servant. Hobbs’s duties, although initially confined to such routine matters as wardrobe maintenance and appointment scheduling, eventually expanded to include all the physical and technical labor associated with Ruskin’s flourishing hobby of daguerreotype photography, a then-new process that produced shimmering, optically precise images on silvered copperplates treated with blue mercury and other toxic chemicals. During Ruskin’s mountaineering expedition to Switzerland in 1849, it was Hobbs who carried the cumbersome daguerreotype apparatus to the top of the Matterhorn and, at Ruskin’s direction, snapped the first known photograph from that lofty peak.

Contradictory, stubborn, supercilious, and yet one of the most influential and emblematic minds of his era, Ruskin rightly stands at the intellectual nexus of The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848–1875, an exhibition currently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., and traveling next year to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The show offers a judiciously selected overview of Victorian photography, using frequent side-by-side comparisons to emphasize the new art form’s sometimes tortured relationship to the period’s most distinctive and memorable development in English painting, the Pre-Raphaelite movement, for which Ruskin acted as both muse and unofficial spokesperson (see Figs. 8, 9).

In his Modern Painters (1843–1860), a book once considered all but indispensible reading for cultured Britons, Ruskin not only described how the best artists of his day worked but also offered advice on the proper path for their future labors, stressing the importance of exactitude, elevated moral purpose, and fidelity to nature. “Then let the details of the foreground be separately studied,” he decreed. “For the other details, the highest examples of the ideal forms or characters which he requires are to be selected by the artist from his former studies, or fresh studies made expressly for the purpose, leaving as little as possible—nothing, in fact, beyond their connection and arrangement—to mere imagination.”¹

William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the other founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood took these exhortations to heart, often working outdoors to study the landscape portions of their compositions and adopting Ruskin’s dictum of “separately studied” details as an aesthetic principle, in part to challenge the Royal Academy’s accepted notions of unified and harmonious scenes. Photography played a role in these innovations. Employing assistants, servants, and in some cases professional photographers to produce studies of discrete compositional fragments—faces, poses, scenery—the Pre-Raphaelites were able to assemble and synthesize sufficient visual material to create large, ambitious works whose unconventional sense of design, intermittently hard-edged naturalism, and brooding air of melancholy, yielded a style subtly different from anything the world had previously known. The best early Pre-Raphaelite painting in the Washington show, Millais’ The Woodman’s Daughter (Fig. 3), provides ample evidence of these trends; it also draws attention to the grand narrative impulse that characterized many, though not all, of the group’s efforts from this period.

At the first public exhibition of the Pre-Raphaelites’ work, in 1849, just a year after a series of violent revolutions had shaken Paris, Vienna, and other European capitals, this seemingly radical mode of picture-making (as well as the group’s collectivist-sounding name and the cryptically sinister initials “P. R. B.” that appeared on all the canvases) prompted cries of outrage from conservative elements in the London art world—an overblown reaction whose attendant publicity left the brothers quite pleased. Decades after the smoke cleared, Bernard Sickert (1862–1932), an English painter some thirty-five years younger than the principal Pre-Raphaelites, assessed their aesthetics in a more level headed manner, perceptively noting that the Brotherhood “considered beauty to be attainable by a conglomeration of things intrinsically beautiful. A poet’s idea is beautiful, a woman is beautiful, mediaeval costume is beautiful, sunshine and spring and roses are beautiful. Put all these beautiful ingredients together and the result must be beautiful.”²

The female form, while not the group’s sole source of subject matter, was seldom very far from the Pre-Raphaelite mind. The Washington show includes a remarkable pairing of Rossetti’s well-known The Blue Silk Dress (Fig. 6), which depicts arts and crafts designer William Morris’s wife, Jane, and several photographs of Jane Morris taken at Rossetti’s behest by the Irish painter and studio photographer John Robert Parsons (Fig. 5). Rossetti refined and adapted aspects of Parsons’s work in creating The Blue Silk Dress—but valuable though the photographs may have been as a visual aid, they also held deep personal significance for Rossetti, as Jane Morris was his secret lover. Despite Victorian moral strictures, romantic entanglements of this type were fairly commonplace in Pre-Raphaelite circles. Ruskin’s wife, Effie (1828–1897), for instance, had their marriage legally annulled in 1854—publicly charging Ruskin with impotency—so that she could take up with Millais, to whom she eventually bore eight children.

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