Wonders of creation
Martin Gayford
Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature Tate Britain, until 3 May Inthe early part of 1887. Vincent Van Gogh was in the habit of visiting an English painter friend named A. J. Hartrick at his studio in Paris. Sometimes Hartrick was out and, while he was waiting. Van Gogh examined the works of Hartrick's flatmate, a certain Ryland. The latter, according to Hartrick's memoirs,
'found himself unmercifully attacked by the free tongue of Van Gogh, who told him that they [his works] were anaemic and useless reflections of the Pre-Raphaelites — a kind of artist he mostly despised'.
'I would return,' Hartrick continues, 'to find Ryland, who suffered from sick headaches, with his head wrapped in a towel soaked in vinegar and looking sickly yellow, while he wailed, "Where have you been? That terrible man has been here for two hours waiting for you and I can't stand it any more."' Now what, one wonders, would Vincent have made of Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature, the new exhibition of 19th-century British landscape painting at Tate Britain? Well, although the great man apparently didn't like the Pre-Raphaelites, the works in the exhibition probably aren't the kind he especially loathed. The luckless Ryland, it seems, painted 'weak watercolours of the "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" type', but there is none of that soppy mediaeval Rossetti-ish or BurneJones-like sort of thing in this show.
Pre-Raphaelitism in fact wasn't really an 'ism' at all (even less so than Impressionism, and most other isms). It was more a loose group of friends, or — as they themselves described it — 'a brotherhood'. Stylistically, there were at least two strands: the romantic mediaevalism, or, if you dislike it, as I do, creepy whimsy that derived from Dante Gabriel Rossetti: and a sort of hard-edged, early photo-realism, which seemed to derive from a close examination of every object in the picture through a magnifying glass. The two strands, admittedly, merge from time to time, particularly in the work of Millais. But this exhibition is out to disentangle them.
Its argument is that the close-focus naturalists among the Pre-Raphaelites — notably Ford Madox Brown, Millais and in some moods Holman Hunt — anticipated French Impressionism by a decade at least. They were painting fresh, contemporary landscapes outdoors in the 1850s, while Monet and Manet didn't begin to do this until the 1860s. For someone such as myself who is inclined to side with Van Gogh, this is definitely the most attractive aspect of the PRB. There are some pictures on show — not many, but certainly a few — which make you feel that in England in the early 1850s there were artists interested in what Baudelaire called. 'the heroism of modern life'.
Most of the best of these are by Ford Madox Brown. In his 'An English Autumn Afternoon' of 1852-5, a young middleclass couple idle away their time on a Hampstead hillside, with a great sweeping panorama of London behind them. It's full of light and air, and a convincing feeling that this is really what things were like. But Brown was a slightly peripheral figure. Ruskin, seeing this picture, famously asked him why he had chosen such an ugly subject. Because, answered Brown, it was outside my back window.
Many of the pictures on show, however, seem to be motivated not by an urge to paint real life but by something slightly different: an impulse, half-romantic, halfscientific, to scrutinise the wonders of God's creation. This tended to be done bit by bit, leaf by leaf, stone by stone. In the watercolours of Ruskin, often all that is visible are a few areas of intensely examined detail, the rest of the sheet is left blank.
Not surprisingly, the results of this piecemeal inventory of the world were not terribly unified as pictures, and have a feeling which is not so much real as surreal. Millais's Ophelia — painted separately from the waterplants in the background — looks as though she has tumbled into a pond in the glasshouse at the Botanical Gardens. John Roddam Spencer Stanhope's `Robins of Modern Times', with its sleeping Alice-like girl seen with mesmerising precision, is downright dreamlike.
This is, of course, interesting. But the trouble with this exhibition is that there aren't enough good pictures to make the case, especially when they are spread over the labyrinthine downstairs galleries at Tate Britain. Millais, Brown and Holman Hunt come out looking like real stars. Edward Lear's picture of the quarries at Syracuse is a bit of a show-stopper, too. But there are far too many dull paintings in between.
One leaves feeling that there might have been something revolutionary stirring in English studios in the 1850s. But not nearly enough to develop what American politicians call the big mo' — the momentum — which every successful art movement needs. In those days, they had that in Paris — which is doubtless why Hartrick and his unfortunate friend went there.
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