Art
The Pre-Raphaelites
IN one respect the English exhibition is particularly well timed. It has come at-the • first moment of the reaction in favour of the Pre-Raphaelites. Had the exhibition been held two or three years ago the rooms .assigned to the Pre- Raphaelites would have been seriously visited only by those who had been brought up on the ideas of that school and had never abandoned them. This year they are being visited also by the relatively young who are beginning to .realize that it is at any rate worth looking to see what the Pre- Raphaelites were up to, and that they are no longer simply a subject for drawing-room jokes. This change of attitude is partly the inevitable effect of time, but it may also be connected with a general change of attitude towards painting which seems to be taking place. • Till recently those interested in modern painting tended to consider first and foremost the design, pattern and general conception of a, painting. This was perhaps ultimately the effect of the movement in art which ended in Cubism but which indirectly affected the judgement of many people who did not approve of its more extreme forms. In any case it led students to think of paintings as single entities, as coherentwholes. Now things are changing. Instead of talking of design we talk of texture ; instead of
the general conception we admire skilful detail ; instead of standing back from the painting and half closing our eyes we study its surface inch by inch with magnifying glass and electric torch. In fact we are more interested in the parts than the whole, and we are, therefore, prepared to consider paintings in which certain things are successful even though the wholes are failures.
This point of view makes for an enjoyment of the Pre- Raphaelites. For they had none of that sense of monumental design which distinguishes the painters whom they thought they were imitating, and the general conception of their works is often violently distasteful to us.• But we arc now prepared to admire their care for craftsmanship and perfection of detail, and their disapproval of all shorthand methods. So that, while we may want to giggle at Holman Hunt's Scapegoat we arc forced to admit that the few square inches of landscape in Millais' Blind Girl are of the greatest beauty and to see qualities in Ford Madox Brown's Last of England which five years ago we should have missed simply by neglecting to look closely enough. Rossetti is now generally acknowledged to be a good draughtsman, and only Burnc-Jones is neglected, whose effeminate conception of the human figure and weak sense of colour are not compensated by his feeling for decora- tion.
It was a witty but a naughty inspiration which led the
Hanging Committee to put two of Blake's tempera paintings in the Pre-Raphaelite room, Jim this juxtaposition calls attention to the fact that at this point the English tradition developed backwards. For though it is one part of the truth that the Pre-Raphaelites possessed more qualities than has recently been admitted, it would be another part to say that Blake achieved more perfectly than they all their particular aims. The conveyance of poetical or religious ideas, an admiration for the mediaeval, attention to Minutely articulated detail, love of good craftsmanship and concentra- tion on clearly defined outline arc all qualities particularly associated with Blake and are also the chief ideals of the Pre-Raphaelites. The link between the two may be formed by Blake's pupils, Richmond, Calvert and Palmer, who handed in his ideas in a diluted 'Orin, adding to them an atmosphere of mild romanticism, but completely missing Blake's terribilita. With the Pre-Raphaelites the tradition is still weaker. Their emotional temperature, compared with Blake's white heat, is only a faintly glowing red, and they entirely lacked his talent for creating linear designs suggesting fierce movement. But, in spite of this, they were more nearly than any other artists his heirs in the second half of the . nineteenth century, and it is good that their importance is beginning to be recognized again. Let us hope that the public wi l continue
its good work in restoring the half-mighty who have fallen and extend its interest to another unfairly neglected and far less distasteful artist, Sir Edwin Landseer.
ANTHONY BLUNT.
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