Reading the Pre-Raphaelites

by Tim Barringer

• ISBN13: 9780300077872
• ISBN10: 0300077874
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 1999-02-08
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

Liberated from the constraints of tradition, the Pre-Raphaelites of mid-Victorian England produced distinctive representations of nature and society in paintings remarkable for their compositional vitality and hallucinatory effects of color. This lavishly illustrated book provides a fresh appraisal of the Pre-Raphaelite artists and their radical departure from artistic conventions. Tim Barringer explores the meanings so richly encoded in Pre-Raphaelite paintings and analyzes key pictures and their significance within the complex social and cultural matrix of nineteenth-century Britain. In chapters devoted to core themes, the author discusses such artists as John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Ford Madox Brown and their engagement with medieval revivalism, nature worship, issues of class and gender, and the reconciliation of the religious image and realism.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION	7	(14)
Past and Present	7	(4)
Pre-Raphaelite Identities	11	(3)
Contexts	14	(3)
Art History and Pre-Raphaelitism	17	(4)
ONE Rebellion and Revivalism	21	(34)
Architecture and Society	24	(4)
Ford Madox Brown and the Westminster Frescoes	28	(4)
The Brotherhood	32	(5)
Revivalism and Realism	37	(8)
Rossetti and his Followers in the 1850s	45	(6)
Pre-Raphaelitism to Socialism	51	(4)
TWO Truth to Nature	55	(30)
Ruskin and Turner	57	(3)
Modern Painters and Pre-Raphaelite Painting	60	(6)
Peculiarly English: Madox Brown's View from the Suburbs	66	(5)
Young Ruskinians: Brett and Inchbold	71	(8)
Time, Mood and Nostalgia: Victorian Landscape after Pre-Raphaelitism	79	(6)
THREE Modern Life	85	(24)
Modern Life and Genre	87	(2)
Separate Spheres	89	(5)
The Fallen Woman	94	(6)
Men at Work	100	(9)
FOUR Art, Religion and Empire	109	(26)
Tractarian Tendencies	110	(4)
Muscular Christianity	114	(2)
The Light of the World	116	(2)
Religion, Race and Empire: Holman Hunt in the Holy Land	118	(10)
Typological Symbolism	128	(7)
FIVE Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes	135	(33)
Millais in 1856: Evocations of Mood	136	(4)
Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddall	140	(6)
Bocca Baciata	146	(3)
The Condition of Music	149	(6)
Bohemianism and the Erotic	155	(4)
Burne-Jones: Pre-Raphaelite to Aesthete	159	(5)
The Whistler-Ruskin Trial	164	(4)
EPILOGUE	168	(2)
TIMELINE	170	(2)
BIBLIOGRAPHY	172	(2)
PICTURE CREDITS	174	(1)
INDEX	174