Stuart King finds out about a lesser-known pre-Raphaelite painter, currently on show at Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Charles Fairfax Murray, The King's Daughters
The current Best of British exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery includes some pictures donated by Fairfax Murray, sometimes called the “unknown pre-Raphaelite”. Although Murray has primarily been remembered as a collector and dealer in pictures, his own work on display, The Kings Daughters, clearly shows the pre-Raphaelite influence on his work.
A new book, Desperate Romantics: the private lives of the Pre-Raphaelites by Franny Moyle, is a good start for anyone wanting to understand the significance of the pre-Raphaelites for British art.
Don’t be put off the book by the TV series of the same name. While the TV version could be described as “Carry on up the Royal Academy”, the book itself is a serious art history of the Pre-Raphaelites, albeit one that concentrates on the lives, loves and celebrity of the leading figures of the brotherhood.
The book opens with a description of London on 10 April 1848, the day of the great Chartist demonstration in favour of universal male suffrage. John Everett Millais and his friend William Holman Hunt enthusiastically joined the mass demonstration after a night of frenetic painting – they were finishing their submissions to the Royal Academy summer show.
Radical and revolutionary ideas were in the air in 1848. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), formed a few weeks after the demonstration, reflected this in its desire to overthrow the stifling orthodoxy imposed on British art by its pre-eminent institution, the Royal Academy (RA). Moyle says: “Idealisation and generalisation were cornerstones of the RA dogma. Nature should be improved on rather than copied.” The RA’s ideal was the classicised art of the High Renaissance and Raphael.
The PRB was dedicated to overthrowing this straightjacket. Their art aimed to make their subjects more accessible and real, to paint nature as it was, from real observation, not to produce an idealised version.
In 1850 the first showing of the PRB’s new work at the RA was pilloried in the press. The Times protested. The Brotherhood was lampooned in the pages of Punch and Charles Dickens savaged the new movement. This could have been the end for the PRB were it not for a champion it found in John Ruskin. He rallied to the defence of Millais and Hunt in the Times and became an important patron and supporter of the two artists.
Franny Moyle’s book takes us through the rise in fortunes of the PRB in a series of biographies, linking together not only Millais, Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ruskin and his wife Effie Gray, but all the women and friends who came into this circle. In so doing she manages to give an important insight into the pre-Raphaelite paintings, placing them within the romantic attachments and obsessions of the individual painters.
The PRB’s models or “muses”, Lizzie Siddall, Annie Miller, Effie Gray, Fanny Cornforth, Jane Burden, are central to the dynamic creativity of the group in the 1850s. It is a dynamic that is linked to sexual liaisons between the painters and their models. Yet such liaisons spelt ruin for the women involved if they came from respectable society. Even being an artist’s model was courting scandal.
As self-proclaimed revolutionaries the group wanted to throw aside the suffocating morals of Victorian England yet they remained bound by the expectations of their class – and their fear of alienating the establishment that bought their paintings and paid their bills. Marrying outside one’s class was still considered shocking. For Rossetti and Holman Hunt the answer was to “educate and improve” their working class models, to make them acceptable for marriage.
It was this contradiction, a class-sexual one, that was to blow the PRB apart. Millais fell for Ruskins’ wife Effie while she modelled for him; as a result the Ruskin and Millais relationship was shattered. Holman Hunt went off to the Holy Land to paint, leaving Annie Miller to be “improved”. Annie had other ideas and modelled for, and bedded, at least two of the other PRBs including Rossetti – Hunt never forgave him. Rossetti was a hopeless womaniser, and this was a major factor in the suicide of Lizzie Siddall in 1862, a key model for the early PRB. The original PRB never recovered from these blows.
Rossetti continued the PRB in the late 1850s and 60s with two new recruits, Edward Byrne-Jones and William Morris. It was during this period that the PRB was joined by Fairfax Murray, first as a designer of stained glass windows for William Morris’ firm, and later as a painter and collector in his own right.
By the 1860s the PRB had achieved its major aim, to overthrow the stifling conformity of Victorian neo-classical art. But in the process they had been co-opted by the very institutions they had set out to overthrow. Millais became a hugely wealthy artist, a president of the RA and was made a Baronet by Gladstone in 1885. Holman Hunt also became a pillar of Victorian society, famous for his religious paintings. It was left to William Morris to travel politically in the opposite direction, becoming more, not less, radical as he got older.
DOV article on the TV series, Desperate Romantics
Desperate Romantics: the private lives of the Pre-Raphaelites by
Franny Moyle is published by John Murray at £8.99.
Image with thanks to the trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Best of British is on display until 27 September.
