AFA Summer 2018

Summer 106 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Fig. 3: Jan van Eyck (1390-1441), The Annunciation, ca. 1434/1436. Oil on canvas transferred from panel, 35½ x 13⅜ inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Andrew W. Mellon Collection (1937.1.39). Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. n 1848—a year of political revolution across Europe—seven young Englishmen formed a secret artistic alliance with aspirations to rebel against the contemporary art world. Calling themselves the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), the artists defined a new visual language of truth and beauty against the backdrop of their rapidly industrializing world. Drawing on literary sources, poetry, and scenes from medieval and modern life, the Pre-Raphaelites established themselves as the most radica l contemporary artists of the Victorian period by engaging in an aesthetic dialogue with art and artists from past centuries. The three principal artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti—met when they were students at the Royal Academy Schools in London. At the heart of their agenda, the PRB opposed the prevailing aesthetics of the Royal Academy’s first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds. They instead appropriated critic John Ruskin’s mandate, outlined in the first of his five volumes of Modern Painters (1843), that artists should “go to Nature in all singleness of heart . . . rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing: believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth.” Ruskin’s directive to find truth in nature, initially conceived as a defense of the artist J. M. W. Turner, became a core principle in the Pre-Raphaelites’ early compositions, which are especially rich in precise botanical details. As Hunt recalled in his memoir Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood (1905–1906), “The f irst principle of Pre-Raphaelitism was to eschew all that was conventional in contemporary art.” According to William Michael Rossetti, one of the circle and Dante’s brother, the PRB’s “bond of union” was distilled to four key principles, which clarified their aims: “1, To have genuine ideas to express; 2, to study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them; 3, to sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote; and 4, and most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.” The Pre- Raphaelites set out to upend the art world as they knew it, and their chosen method for doing so was a self-consciously archaizing label and corresponding aesthetic (Figs. 1, 2). While the name “Pre-Raphaelite” suggests a singular focus on early Italian art, that definition only scratches the surface of their sources of inspiration, which ranged from fifteenth-century early Netherlandish works to sixteenth-century Venetian paintings more accurately termed “post-Raphaelite,” in addition to genres and materials as varied as medieval illuminated manuscripts and stained glass. Because no official members of the brotherhood had been to Italy when they formed the group, their access to Italian art was