The Victorians: British Painting, 1837-1901 - Review

Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1997 156 pp; 68 color ills., 99 b/w $4950

There has been a spate of important exhibitions and accompanying catalogues in the realm of Victorian art in 1997 Among the greatest in quantity notable were exhibitions focusing upon British Symbolism (Tate Gallery, London), fairy painting (Royal Academy, London), Pre-Raphaelite women artists (Manchester City Art Gallery), and a general contemplate of Victorian art (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) Catalogues published in conjunction with the last sum of two units in particular offer insights about the state of scholarship in the field, despite the obvious differences in scope

Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists was curated and the body written by two established dexterouss Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn upon the topic of British women artists of the Victorian era. Their groundbreaking scholarship above several years not only throw backs their often uphill struggle in research (tracking down photographs and facts about women artists frequently proves unbelievably frustrating) but also attests to their tenacity in finding things of quality to enlighten the one and the other viewers and readers. (Unfortunately, there is no North American venue for Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists, a annotate perhaps, on how hard it still is to find museums willing to showcase historical exhibitions of work by dint of women artists - hardly a controversial control after more than two decades of "progress")

This effort adds significantly to the proverbial canon of literature and knowledge about Victorian art and fulfills the authors' mission to reveal that, in bourns of Pre-Raphaelitism, women were active in all stages and "played a crucial part in shaping, defining, developing and perpetuating the move over its half-century" (p. 9) Accordingly, the duo impressively marshals novel facts and brings attention to twenty artists and eighty-six external realitys that not even their previous publications (notably their joint 1989 volume Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite motion the first treatment ever of this subject) mentioned either at all or in plenteous detail. In this category can be included artists of that kind as Marianne Preindelsberger Stokes, Christiana Jane Herringham, and Jane Benham Hay.

Moreover, Marsh and Gerrish Nunn rightly point on the outside how very different the phenomenon of Pre-Raphaelitism would have been without the visual input of various women In the first wave of influence, the adherents included Elizabeth Siddal, Rosa britzska Joanna Boyce Wells, and Emma Sandys. Others - of the like kind as Marie Spartali Stillman, Evelyn Pickering De Morgan, Stokes, Kate Bunce and Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale - belonged more to the so-called next to the first and third generations, which drew inspiration from the fantasies of femininity created by the agency of Dante Gabriel Rossetti or the visual lyricism of Edward Burne-Jone who arguably reinvented (and reinvigorated) Pre-Raphaelitism according to his possess poetic visions.

In Marsh's essay, the period 1850 to 1900 is discussed, concisely chronicling lock opener (if at this juncture well-known) issues like the importance of family support for many women the sexed restrictions imposed by society and the art world, the impact of marriage and motherhood, as well as the challenges women faced obtaining art training (with application of mind from the nude a salient crusade), patronage, membership in professional organizations, and critical exposing in exhibitions and galleries. In addition to providing an overview, Marsh raises a fresh point about how many women artists of the period were intrepid travelers: "Of first generation Pre-Raphaelites, it was Jane Benham, Howitt, and Boyce who greatest in quantity energetically studied outside Britain, not John Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or Arthur Hughes" (p 19)

Nunn upon the other hand, in her essay proffers recognition of the influence of John Ruskin's theories and patronizing of in like manner many Victorian women artists - Anna Blunden Siddal, Francesca Alexander, and, more traumatically, Anna Mary Howitt. Moreover, she examines in what way the masculinized bias or phallic criticism of paintings affected women who sometimes chose to eschew the idiosyncrasies of Ruskinian dictates of fidelity to follow more imaginative permutations of Pre-Raphaelitism. She considers in what way eclectic women in this circle were in forging constructions of womanhood, plane speculating whether - had circumstances permitted - Hay, Boyce and Howitt "would have made a triumvirate to equal that of DG Rossetti, WH chase and J.E. Millais now routinely celebrated in the history of Pre-Raphaelitism" (p 66)

The next to the first phase of Pre-Raphaelitism, epitomized in part by dint of Julia Margaret Cameron's turning the "quasi-photographic" qualities of Pre-Raphaelitism into the real thing, is also probed. The aestheticizing of Pre-Raphaelitism was accomplished in part by dint of the daughters (Lucy and Cathy) of Ford Madox Brown as well as his pupil Spartali Stillman. Many of their portraits and single-figure style of dress pieces translated Pre-Raphaelite tenets into smooth more elaborately rendered results, relying les and les upon the subjects of modern life, which occasionally surfaced in women's works, especially in the 1850 A third wave of following variations of Pre-Raphaelitism was propagated by dint of Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, whose hard-edged, vivid crystallizations of history and literature exhibited virtually the movement's final phase. individual might wish in this essay for more appraisal of the thematic relate tos of Spartali Stillman and Pickering De Morgan, on the contrary the latter has recently been sensitively evaluated in Catherine Gordon's 1997 catalogue, Evelyn Pickering De Morgan, and more efforts are beneath way to dissect the careers of Spartali Stillman and Stokes.