Graphic Content

One of the many joys of reading Vincent Van Gogh’s letters is his frequent references to other artists he admired. There are, of course, references to Millais, Corot, and others we still know well today, but it is the lesser-known names, the forgotten gems, that make you scour the internet for more. The English illustrator and painter Frank Holl appears in no less than eleven of Van Gogh’s letters. Born July 4, 1845, Holl drew Van Gogh’s attention with his graphic work in the socially conscious newspaper The Graphic founded by artist and social reformer William Luson Thomas. In the days before photographic reproduction in periodicals, magazines and newspapers relied on the talents of illustrators to capture the public’s eye and, in the case of The Graphic, the public’s heart and mind. While working for The Graphic, Holl painted such socially conscious works as Her Firstborn (above, from 1876), which shows dramatically and, yes, graphically the funeral procession of a family burying a young child. The poses and expressions of the figures are operatic in their emotion. You could almost hear a Puccini aria playing in the distance. In the Victorian age, infant and childhood mortality remained an agonizing reality. Holl’s poor British subjects and Van Gogh’s Dutch peasants both knew that reality well and both artists tapped into that emotion for their art.

In 1878, Thomas assigned Holl to visit Newgate Prison and create illustrations to accompany a story. In response, Holl painted Newgate: Committed for Trial (above, from 1878), which captures the pathos of a woman and child visiting the husband and father, respectively, held prisoner there. Holl actually painted this work inside Newgate prison to get all the physical and emotional details just right. The debtor’s prison remained another harsh reality for Victorians in England as the gap between the haves and the have nots widened to a chasm. For the upper classes in England, such sights were usually reserved for the lower classes. Holl brashly brings the dark side of British society in the 1870s to those in power by first painting such works and then exhibiting them at the Royal Academy alongside more genteel works. In many ways, Holl’s personal philosophy as enacted in his art mirrors that of the Ashcan School in America when they expanded their socially conscious graphic art to paint every corner, even the darkest, of urban American reality.

In 1877, Holl returned to the subject of childhood death with Hush! (above, from 1877). A mother asks an older child to be quiet as she anxiously watches over a sick baby. Both mother and elder sibling clearly know what might happen but don’t dare disturb the hushed silence by broaching the subject of death. In Hushed, the companion piece to Hush!, we witness the aftermath of the baby’s death. The mother covers her face while the surviving older child stands in stunned silence. The subtlety of the changed silence as conveyed in the two works illustrates Holl’s sensitivity and great psychological touch in portraying these people who too often remained invisible in British society. Unfortunately for Holl, such works did not sell well enough for him to support his own family. Holl painted portraits of the rich and powerful to provide for his family and to give himself the freedom to paint the socially conscious works closer to his heart. Working seven days a week, Holl eventually died from exhaustion at 43. "It is not too much to say that my father threw his life away by his utter inability to rest from work," Holl’s daughter later wrote. Thanks to Van Gogh, art lovers today can rediscover Holl’s paintings as well as his reforming passion.

Brotherly Love

Before you even open Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision, edited by Katherine Lochman and Carol Jacobi, you know that this is a different kind of art history book. The faux Victorian exterior design and endpapers transport you back to that time and prepare you to see the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and others through their eyes and not through the distorting lens of a century and a half of critique, including the help (and sometimes harm) of fellow Victorian John Ruskin’s writings. In his 1905 book, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt railed against depictions of Rossetti as the clear leader of the group, calling himself the “true” Pre-Raphaelite adhering to the original tenets of the Brotherhood. “The book ends with an attack on decadence [i.e., French Impressionism and Modernism in general] and an expression of anxiety about the downfall of the noble British artistic tradition,” Carole Silver writes in her essay, “Visions and Revisions.” In a painting such as Hunt’s The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro During the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry on the Eve of Saint Agnes (above, from 1848), taking a scene from Keats’ poem The Eve of Saint Agnes, Hunt rewrites Keats’ lines to emphasize his moralizing mission. In casting the fleeing lovers as moral rather than the drunken partiers, “Dreams are compared with truth, appetite to love, social rules and rituals to personal freedom,” Carol Jacobi writes in “Pre-Raphaelite Rebellion: Brotherly Love.” As Jacobi puts it, the Pre-Raphaelites arose from “[s]tylistic innovation… generated by a shared interest in vision that was part of a timely and sophisticated inquiry into the nature of subjectivity… artists, poets, and critics alike debated the predicament of the individual in modern circumstance and the role of art in a material age.” This collection sets out to show how Hunt and his “brothers” set out to save the world through art by reaching back to the “Pre-Raphaelite,” pre-corrupted age of morality that the materialism of their society had left behind.

The most concrete example of Hunt’s personal mission to spread the word remains The Light of the World (above, the second, 1854 version). In “The Light of the World: Mission and Message,” Jonathan Mane-Wheck retraces the steps of the most traveled artwork in history, seen by more than seven million people on a 1905 tour of the British Empire, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. Mane-Wheck sees modern distaste for Hunt’s Light originating in confusion between the work itself and the “kitsch industry” surrounding and, in many ways, stemming from it. Hunt paints Christ holding a lantern and knocking on a door—an embodiment of opportunity knocking, in this case the opportunity to embrace salvation. Hunt himself, however, rejected harsh dogma. “Possessing a more synthetic, universalist concept of religion,” Mane-Wheck asserts, Hunt “was open to Judaism and Islam.” In fact, when Hunt created a smaller version of his Light in 1854, he modified the lamp with a star and crescent as a nod to Islam “to show the breadth of the Christian system, which takes in other systems,” Hunt told an interviewer at the time. Unfortunately, over time, Hunt’s personal intentions have been clouded not only by a religious intolerance he did not practice, but also by political appropriation. “In its journey across the globe,” Mane-Wheck writes, “The Light of the World had become an icon of British Imperial Protestantism.” Hunt certainly believed in the nobility of British art and its power to save, but may have been uneasy in his Christ being “drafted” in the battle for colonization.

In “Textile Background: Cloth and Costume,” Linda Parry examines Hunt’s life-long relationship with fabrics and costume and how that experience played out in his painting. Both Hunt’s father and grandfather worked in the London textile industry. Hunt grew up in a home just above the textile works and even worked in the industry for two years before devoting himself to art. The drawings of the clothing designers were among the first artworks Hunt saw firsthand. This world of color and textures easily translated into the opulence of such works as The Finding of the Savior in the Temple (above, from 1860)—Hunt’s retelling of the story of the young Christ found lecturing in the temple. Many of the rich colors in Hunt’s painting copy newly developed dyes of the 1850s. (Joyce H. Townsend and Jennifer Poulin discuss elsewhere Hunt’s painstaking approach to pigments to the point of pointing out defects to the manufacturers.) Photographs of costumes Hunt designed for his models accompanying Parry’s essay as testimony not only to Hunt’s love of fashion, but also of his exacting brand of realism. Thanks to his travels in the Middle East and the Holy Land, Hunt developed a taste for exotic dress that he satisfied with costumes for himself, which allowed him to feel closer to the religious subjects centuries in the past that he painted in the Victorian present.

It is Hunt’s relentless search for fidelity in his depiction of matters of faith that truly sets him apart from his Pre-Raphaelite brethren. As a pilgrim in the Holy Land, Hunt identified with the plight of the Jewish people to the point of becoming an outspoken Zionist in support of the founding of a Jewish state. As Nicholas Tromans explains in “Palestine: Picture of Prophecy,” Hunt “saw himself as a kind of avant-garde Christian intellectual, looking confidently (on the whole) to the future of an ever-changing world in which a divine centre nevertheless held steady.” Neither Darwinism nor Zionism could shake Hunt’s faith. In fact, Hunt saw a continuity not only between the symbolic typology of Judaism and of Christianity but also between, as Tromans puts it, “divine revelation and modern science.” Hunt’s humanism spurs him to paint works such as The Shadow of Death (above, from 1871), which combines the realism of Hunt’s research in the Middle East with the symbolism of the cross-like shadow in the rear that horrifies the Virgin Mary. In fact, Hunt’s humanism as played out in the realistic depiction of Christ as carpenter stretching his limbs drew criticism for being too real and ignoring the divine side of the savior. In his religion, his politics, and his art, Hunt refused to draw the same lines of distinction that others did. Tromans paints a picture of Hunt the Zionist as a Victorian Bono. “Like a rock star of today seeking to shame politicians into acting on African poverty,” Tromans writes, not naming names, “Hunt’s credibility to speak [on a Jewish state] lay paradoxically exactly in his political inexperience and overt individualism.” I couldn’t help smiling at Tromans comparison, which cast Hunt, the “stodgy” “pious” Victorian in a whole new light. I almost immediately put amber, wraparound sunglasses on Hunt in my mind’s eye.

Carole Silver sums up the whole Hunt (above in his Self-Portrait of 1867) nicely: “Today we see him as a man of his era, replete with its visions and blindnesses, at times a rebel, at others deeply conventional, intensely nationalistic and filled with British imperialist ideology, yet capable of great religious and ethnic tolerance, at times patriarchal, at others somewhat radical in view of relations between the sexes.” As much recent research on the Victorian era suggests, the Victorians were never as “Victorian” as we believe them to be. They were as inconsistent, intolerant, and individualistic as any other age but perhaps slightly more conscious of the modern turn towards materialism and away from the spiritual to the point of wanting to reverse the course. In his 1867 Self-Portrait, Hunt paints himself as painter-prophet adorned in the richly colored dress of a Middle Eastern wise man while holding a palette full of colors with which he could paint his next tale of moral instruction. Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision wipes away much of the false imagery of intervening discourse and takes us back to the source, lighting the path back to The Light of the World and other works to illuminate their original intent, which is invariably more interesting than the conventional wisdom handed down to us. The Victorians stood on the brink of the modern life that we continue to deal with today. William Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood tried to turn back the clock to the fundamentals of life and art that they believed would make the future brighter and better.

[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision, edited by Katherine Lochman and Carol Jacobi.]

Maneaters

The idea of the “maneater” or, as the French would say, femme fatale is one of the oldest tropes in Western civilization, going all the way back to Samson’s Delilah in the Bible and further back into the darkness before recorded time. Much of the look of the modern maneater comes from the brush of the most sensual member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Born May 12, 1828, Rossetti founded the PRB with John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt and followed the religious and moralizing trend of the Brotherhood at the beginning. However, Rossetti drifted more and more to the carnal over the spiritual, especially after the death of his one-time model, fellow-artist, wife, and everlasting muse Elizabeth Siddal. A year after Lizzie’s death, Rossetti began painting Beata Beatrix (above, from 1864-1870), which casts his departed wife as Beatrice Portinari from Dante Alighieri's poem La Vita Nuova. Dante Alighieri held Beatrice up as the epitome of purity, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti seems to follow suit, but there are hints that Siddal as Beatrice isn’t as snow white. The dove that brings flowers isn’t the conventional white of purity but rather the red of passion. Rossetti ostensibly shows the moment when Beatrice dies and experiences the rapture of the divine embrace, but like Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, the difference between an expression of religious thrill and that of sexual orgasm is clearly blurred. As discussed in Jay A. Clarke’s Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth (my review here), Edvard Munch recognized this dual nature in Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix and translated it into his Madonna. Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix perfectly embodies the In Freudian idea of the Madonna-whore complex decades before Freud himself coined the term.



After the death of Lizzie Siddal, Rossetti struggled to find firm footing in her personal life, even as his artistic career blossomed. Rossetti careened among a traffic jam of mistresses, experiencing his fair share of total wrecks. One of those mistresses, Fanny Cornforth, served as the model for Lady Lilith (above, from 1868). Mythology paints Lilith as a strong, usually destructive female force and sometimes even as the first wife of the first man, Adam. Rather than mythologize the scene, Rossetti paints his Lilith in contemporary clothing. Fanny’s Lilith lounges in her bedclothes rather than the corseted garb of Victorian days and contemplates her pouty lips in a mirror. Fast forward a century, and Lady Lilith becomes Sharon Stone crossing her legs in Basic Instinct. Rosetti accompanied Lady Lilith with Sonnet LXXVIII, entitled "Body's Beauty," from his book of poetry The House of Life:

Of Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told
(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,)
That, ere the snake's, her sweet tongue could deceive,
And her enchanted hair was the first gold.

And still she sits, young while the earth is old,
And, subtly of herself contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.
The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where
Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent
And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?
Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent
And round his heart one strangling golden hair.

The long hair Lilith dithers with in the painting becomes literally a noose that strangles unfortunate men in the poem. Whereas Beata Beatrix was equal parts Madonna and whore, Lady Lilith is pure harlot of the black widow variety.

It’s easy to see Rossetti as an embittered chauvinist in his portrayals of his maneaters. Just as the dangerous Lilith is also the strong woman of Lilith Fair fame, Rossetti’s femme fatales are also copies in some respect of the highly accomplished Lizzie Siddal, the supermodel of Pre-Raphaelitism that added a sister to the Brotherhood. With Venus Verticordia (above, from 1863-1868), Rossetti maintains the sense of danger while simultaneously exposing the full power of womanhood. As with Lady Lilith, Rossetti appended a sonnet to Venus Verticordia:

She hath the apple in her hand for thee,

Yet almost in her heart would hold it back;

She muses, with her eyes upon the track

Of that which in thy spirit they can see.

Haply, 'Behold, he is at peace,' saith she;'

Alas! the apple for his lips, - the dart

That follows its brief sweetness to his heart,

-The wandering of his feet perpetually.'

A little space her glance is still and coy;

But if she gets the fruit that works her spell,

Those eyes shall flame as for her Phrygian boy.

Then shall her bird's strained throat woe foretell,

And as far seas moan as a single shell,

And her grove glow with love-lit fires of Troy.

Rossetti mixes the message of menace found in the poem by adding natural touches to the painting. The arrow and apple of doom remain in the painting, but the lack of clothes (hence, all trappings of civilization) and addition of flowers portray Venus as Mother Nature, and you don’t fool with Mother Nature. Rossetti painted the face of Venus from one of his model-mistresses, Alexa Wilding, but he painted the body from a tall nanny that he happened to pass in the street. Only a woman who literally stood head and shoulders above the crowd would fit the bill for this painting. Rossetti painted all three of these maneaters around the same time, showing how he moved back and forth in his view of the subject—a complex and complexing concept that consumed him as he created the most unforgettable images and poems of his career.

Serious Business

Few critics wielded as much power for so long as John Ruskin, shown above in the highly flattering 1853-1854 portrait by John Everett Millais amidst the natural world Ruskin loved and studied so deeply. Born February 8, 1819, set the standards for artistic taste for both the Victorian and Edwardian ages, championing J.M.W. Turner in the 1840s and getting into a famous legal scrap with James McNeill Whistler in the late 1870s. An autodidact Renaissance man who dabbled in poetry and art himself in addition to criticism on the arts and social conditions, Ruskin today seems just another odd figure in the pantheon of odd figures that come down to us from the repressive Victorian times. As Millais painted the scenery behind Ruskin in this portrait, Millais fell in love with Ruskin’s young wife, Effie Gray. eventually marrying her after helping her annul her marriage to Ruskin on the grounds of “incurable impotency.” Ruskin disputed the charge of impotency, but he certainly couldn’t dispute the charge of incurable seriousness. As hard as I try, I just can’t imagine Ruskin ever laughing, even as a child. Ruskin’s dryness is that of the late Wordsworth, Ruskin’s early poetic hero, who became staid and sclerotic when the radical flow of ideas ceased. Unfortunately, Ruskin was never a radical, even in his youth.

Ruskin took up the cause of Turner when critics began to question Turner’s importance. Ruskin even sent a fan letter to Turner asking the artist’s permission to defend his name, but Turner gently tried to dissuade Ruskin, to no avail. Ruskin’s greatest work of criticism, Modern Painters, amounts to a long defense of Turner as the greatest artist ever. It’s a long trudge to get through, but I remember coming away from Modern Painters with a whole new appreciation of the natural world. Ruskin looked longer and harder at natural phenomenon than perhaps even Turner himself, as drawings by Ruskin such as his Study of Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas (above, from 1853) attest. Sadly, the revolutionary naturalism of Turner was as revolutionary as Ruskin was willing to go. The late, visionary works of Turner dismayed and saddened Ruskin to the point that Ruskin barely acknowledges them at all. The modern idea of Turner as the precursor of Impressionism and all modern art would give Ruskin a fainting spell were he alive today. After Turner’s death, Ruskin took on the task of classifying Turner’s work, thus setting the tone for all Turner studies for decades. Coming across erotic works by Turner, Ruskin fought the urge to destroy them and preserve his vision of Turner as a morally upright man and artist. Although sorely tempted, Ruskin didn’t burn the erotic Turners, although he told others that he did, but he did bury them so deeply in the archives that they weren’t found for almost 150 years.

When you add up the ledger of Ruskin’s good deeds versus his bad deeds, I still think the positives come out ahead. Ruskin’s fidelity to Turner’s genius and his fostering of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood helped promote those artists to a wider audience that they might never have found, even today. Like Giorgio Vasari before him and Bernard Berenson after him, Ruskin waded into the vast sea of centuries of Italian art and salvaged many names lost to memory. Ruskin haunted the untraveled paths of Italy and ventured into near-forgotten churches to rediscover and copy for his own use works such as Carpaccio’s Saint George and the Dragon (Ruskin’s copy above, from 1870-1872). Unfortunately, Ruskin couldn’t resist making forceful statements that cost some artists and schools dearly, such as the Bolognese Baroque School of Ludovico Carracci, Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, and others. Ruskin condemned the emotionalism of the Bolognese Baroque as false and untrue and, therefore, unworthy of study, effectively burying those artists for nearly a century under the weight of his powerful opinion. I find it highly ironic that such an unemotional man could sum up the nerve to question the emotions of others, but Ruskin never considered the consequences of his critical actions. It is this strange mix of affinity for nature yet lack of human empathy that makes Ruskin such a unique figure in art history, one more at home with rocks and frescoes than with the flesh and blood people who make and enjoy art.

Attention to Detail

If you think that’s a photograph above, you’re wrong. It’s hard to believe, but William Trost Richards’ Forest Interior (above, from 1865) is just one example of the incredibly photographic draftsmanship of one of America’s truly great landscapists of the nineteenth century. Born November 14, 1833, Richards falls within an art historical crack—born too late to be considered truly part of the Hudson River School and born on the wrong side of the Atlantic to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Richards’ painting is too clinically precise to join the ranks of Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and other more spiritually oriented Hudson River School artists. On the other hand, Richards’ precision matches that of Pre-Raphaelite greats such as John Everett Millais except for one major detail—an almost complete lacking of the human figure. Occasionally Richards would set a person into his landscape as an almost grudging concession to convey a sense of scale. The literary flights of fancy the Pre-Raphaelites painted over and over, however, never enter into Richards’ signature style. Just the facts, he seems to say. Just the facts are magical enough for me.

Richards grew up in Philadelphia but studied for years in Europe before returning to live in Pennsylvania. Upon his return, Richards brought back much of the grand style of Romanticism ala Caspar David Friedrich, but, again, devoid of human presence. Moonlight on Mount Lafayette, New Hampshire (above, from 1873) demonstrates how Richards could depict effects of light on the landscape and on clouds beautifully. Looking through Richards’ oeuvre, you never get the sense that he repeated himself. From fire-red autumnal scenes to cool-blue moonlit landscapes, nothing seemed beyond Richards’ reach. Yet, for all his technical proficiency, he’s little known today, just a footnote in the histories of American art. Perhaps he’s too good, almost too photographic. Realism this real seems somehow unreal without some sense of the artist’s personality mixed in. Unfortunately, Richards never provides a clue to who he is other than a great recorder of nature.

As great as Richards was with oils, he paints in watercolor even better, as can be seen in works such as Beach with Rising Sun, New Jersey (above, from 1870-1875). In the last stage of his career, Richards concentrated mainly on marine scenes, as if he had mastered the inland and now set out to conquer the seas. A trip to England in the 1870s during which he saw the watercolors of J.M.W. Turner most likely inspired Richards to put the water in his watercolors. Turner ranks among the greatest watercolorists ever thanks to his combination of technique and Romantic feel for nature. In these final works, Richards seems to approach a Turner-esque level of Romanticism yet still somehow falls short. It’s difficult to look at these great works and say they fail on some level, but it’s more difficult to say they satisfy completely. These works lack the personality we in the West look for in art. But, in the East, the absence of the artist doesn’t disqualify a piece as great art. Maybe Richards achieved a type of Zen in his art that the uninitiated just can’t relate to.