AFA Summer 2018

2018 Antiques & Fine Art 109 Fig. 6: John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (1829-1908), Love and the Maiden, 1877. Tempera, gold paint and gold leaf on canvas, 54 x 79 inches. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, European Art Trust Fund, Grover A. Magnin Bequest Fund and Dorothy Spreckels Munn Bequest Fund (2002.176). Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Old Masters , on view at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco, from June 30–September 30, 2018, traces the brotherhood through the nineteenth-century “rediscovery” of Botticelli by the English art critics Ruskin and Walter Peter, which paralleled the tempera revival executed by the PRB. The visual affinities between these works create evocative juxtapositions that also demonstrate the influence of the late Renaissance artists, such as Titian and Paolo Veronese, on the Pre-Raphaelites and select contemporaries (Figs 5, 6). This attraction to the art of the past was not limited to paintings, however, and Truth and Beauty features examples of books, furniture, and stained glass, as well as tapestries that emulate sixteenth-century Flemish textiles. The varied sources that informed the Pre-Raphaelites’ aesthetic vocabular y demonstrate the importance of the work that inspired the PRB and redefine more broadly their unique style. This highlights the nuanced paradoxes of the Pre-Raphaelite mission—namely, their efforts to be fundamentally modern by emulating the past, as well as their dichotomous criticism and veneration of Raphael and his artistic impact. In the legacy of their work, we find questions and concepts that still provoke and incite artistic agendas in the twenty-first century. Contemporary artists still wrestle with how, when, and why to engage with art of the past, a dialogue that is evident in the conceptual photography of Cindy Sherman and her History Portraits series, and in the portraits of Kehinde Wiley— such as his recent painting of President Barack Obama, which suggest Old Master paintings in the poses and settings of their subjects, even evoking William Morris patterns in their intricate background foliage. The type of critical engagement with the past that was essential to the PRB is alive and well in contemporary art of the twenty-first century. By reframing their own language of truth and beauty, the Pre-Raphaelites can teach us as much about their place in art history as they can about our own time and the universal questions about the meaning of art.  Melissa Buron is director, art division, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the curator of the exhibition, and the editor and essay author of the exhibition catalogue Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and The Old Masters, on which this article is based. For information on the exhibition (June 30–September 30, 2018), visit legionofhonor.famsf.org ; the publication is available through the museum and online.