Victorian masterpieces

Press, 26 June 1984, Page 21

Victorian masterpieces

The art of the Victorians, long undervalued, has recently been the subject of a spate of books and exhibitions which have given the public an opportunity not only to reassess the skills of the painters and designers of the period between 1837 and 1901, but to admire their great energy and productivity. MARINA VAIZEY, art critic of the London “Sunday Times,” writes.

In the 1850 s, art dealers began in increasing numbers to open premises in major European cities, but Britain, with its famous exhibiting institutions, especially the Royal Academy, founded in London in 1768, was already supporting its artists with substantial purchases and commissions. The natural ambition of most British artists in Victorian times was to become a Royal Academician. One Academician simply declared: “If it were not for the Academy, depend upon it, artists would be treated like carpenters”. For popular artists the rewards were huge. Prince Albert, Victoria’s consort, was an ardent patron of living artists, and he even initiated methods for caring for, and collecting, comparative material about the old masters in the Royal collections which anticipated the methods of modern art history. Artists might earn as much as £15,000 a year, and those at the top of the tree would today be considered, with annual earnings then of as much as £40,000, in the multi-millionaire class. And that is how they lived, in grand houses. Leighton House in Kensington, for example, is probably the grandest one-bedroom palace ever built. It was constructed for a bachelor, Sir Frederick Leighton, president of the Royal Academy and the first artist to be made a peer. Jeremy Maas, an art dealer who 20 years ago helped begin, through his own enthusiasm and scholarship, the major revival of interest in Victorian (1837-1901) art, has just published a huge and absorbing anthology of photographs of the Victorian art world. Successful Victorian artists were celebrities and the craze for photography ensured that their images were sold to the public along with images of the Royal Family, scientists, men of letters, actresses, and other famous and notorious personalities of the day. This level of enthusiasm and interest is not quite duplicated today, but recently a number of

exhibitions and publications in Britain, which has parallels in France and the United States, testify to a substantial increase in the popularity of nineteenth century academic, salon, and Victorian art. Victorian realism in painting fascinates for the light it throws upon Victorian society, but Victorian art is being rehabilitated for other reasons, too.

The biggest exhibition held of Pre-Raphaelite painting, which recently closed at London’s Tate Gallery, drew record crowds. The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of young artists who formed themselves into the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. They were dedicated to finding a purity of art they thought had been lost since the Italian High Renaissance 300 years before. What they became instead was mostly very successful painters indeed, glorifying a particular type of woman, exulting in the most minute detail of landscape, and reconstructing with painstaking accuracy historical scenes. Modern life, costume drama, portraits, religious subjects, moments in literature, provided the subject matter. The Pre-Raphaelites were championed by no less a figure than the great writer and critic John Ruskin. Ruskin felt painting was akin to literature.

Although these young painters caused consternation, outrage, and scandal when they first exhibited, at least the interest they aroused indicates how seriously the art of painting was taken. Now people are enormously impressed by the craftsmanship of much Victorian painting, by the dedication of the artists, by the sensational or absorbing interest of the subject matter. A painting such as Millais’ “Autumn Leaves,” with

three pensive young girls gathered round a pile of immaculately painted leaves, and his vast landscape, “Chill October”, are masteipieces of atmosphere. Ford Madox Brown, a painter who was never as successful in worldly terms as most of his colleagues, produced images that are essential to understanding Victorian times. One such is “The Last of England”, showing a young couple, the wife sheltering their young child in her cloak, in the boat from which they and others were migrating to Australia. The white cliffs of Dover can be seen in the background, and such details as the cabbages for food strung in the boat’s nets underline the care with which such episodes in Britain’s history were portrayed. The Victorians admired achievement, and great men. Julia Margaret Cameron was an amazingly energetic Victorian who turned herself with passionate dedication into an active photographer of the great scientists, thinkers, and writers of the day — Browning, Darwin, Tennyson, Carlyle, Hershdel to name but a few — as well as posing great men, friends, and relations in tableaux and scenes from the Bible and from literature. She has been rediscovered as one of the greatest of Victorian photographers, the portraiist of “Famous Men and Fair Women”. An exhibition of her work is to go to Bonn, Madrid, Paris, Venice, and New York in 1985.

What fascinates people today in exhibition after exhibition and book after book is not only the sheer energy and productivity of the Victorians but their curiosity, their intense interest about all to be found in the world; and also their optimism. The great museums, the public libraries, the civic universi-

ties, the huge railway stations, are Victorian achievements.

During the past 10 years their art, long undervalued, has been seen with new clarity. Even the French have crowded into exhibitions of the Pre-Raphaelites and Turner. The Victorian Society, founded in London in 1958, is preserving much Victorian architecture. Just in the last few years there have been major publications and exhibitions devoted to Ruskin, the greatest of Victorian art critics, and to many individual painters.

An exhibition of works by Sir Edwin Landseer, famous for his paintings of dogs and the Scottish Highlands, was shown both in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and in London’s Tate Gallery. Holman Hunt’s religious paintings, including “The Scapegoat”, for which the artist spent months in Palestine by the Dead Sea painting tethered goats, several of his models expiring before the painting was finished, and “The Light of the World” were among the most famous of all nineteenth century images. William Morris, the writer, poet, and designer, is increasingly admired not only for his visions of a new just society but also for his designs for wallpapers, carpets, and textiles, many of which are popular today.

Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s absorption with medieval tales such as King Arthur and his Round Table of courtly knights, Madox Brown’s dense English landscapes, the recreations of the classical world by Alma-Tadema and Lord Leighton, are all part of a wealth of Victorian images that are increasingly visible in the rediscovery of Victorian culture. London Press Service.