HOWZAT

“He came quite instinctively to me — the way he moves, talks, sits and breaks down Victorian conventions. No pretence. There’s loads of him in me, absolutely loads, and I say that with pride,” Turner laughs. “Rossetti didn’t have the technique of Hunt or Millais. It was his own reputation that became his greatest art. He was one of the first cele­brities, more known for who he was than what he did or painted. He may not have been the most talented, but without him the brotherhood wouldn’t have existed. He helped to create them, kept them alive and kept the faith long after they dispersed.”

Turner grew up in Dublin, which chimes with Rossetti’s Catholic immigrant roots. Indeed, both rejected their faith early on. “I don’t know anybody who goes to church any more,” he shrugs, “although I wouldn’t have the bollocks to say I was an atheist to a journalist. Rossetti was bolder. He knew that Millais and Hunt were tormented by their faith. He didn’t have time to be tormented; he had too many things to do. Religion would mess up his mojo.”

Filming the show, Turner says, the actors fell into the artistic lifestyle instantly: “I came on thinking, I hope we’re like the brotherhood, sticking together, out on the piss and being absolutely debauched. And it kind of was.” The way that mirrored the lives of his heroes Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix persuaded Turner that the brotherhood’s ultimate split was not only inevitable, but desirable.

“With any group, the ideals change, the enthusiasm goes and money comes into the picture,” he argues. “Millais and Hunt — they got what they could out of the pre-Raphs. Money and patronage became the big thing. They needed to start painting what other people wanted. But you can be non­judgmental about these guys leaving: surely it would have got stagnant and tainted the legacy? I’ve stood in front of pictures in Dublin or at the Tate with the PRB mark, and it gives you a real thrill — if it were on thousands of paintings, it wouldn’t have that magic. It’s because they only existed for a short time that they inspired so many artists.”

And here’s the point where you wish for a tiny hint of tedious art history, some worthy professor unpicking a list of facts. Because the brotherhood’s influence is so subtly pervasive, it’s hard to separate it out from the noise of today’s popular culture. George Orwell’s political tract The Lion and the Unicorn placed their fellow traveller William Morris at the core of his oxymoronic dream of a socialist revolution in Britain, and those on the artistic edge have combined nos­talgia and a wish for rebellion ever since.

While the upcoming indie-rock dreamer Florence and the Machine is channelling Kate Bush rather than Lizzie Siddal, the many offspring of acid folk and nu-psychedelia have — albeit unconscious — roots in the PRB and their practical realisation of Ruskin’s theories. From the careful press manipulation of Damien Hirst and his YBA contemporaries through Malcolm McLaren’s situationist Fagin, Peter Jackson’s vision of  The Lord of the Rings — which could have been torn from the walls of the pre-Raphaelites’ studios — and books on pastoral civil disorder by the Idler’s editor,

Tom Hodgkinson, the pre-Raphaelites’ mix of manipulated revolution and imagined lost perfection remains as true for British culture today as it ever was. And that is a sentiment Rossetti would have endorsed.

Desperate Romantics is on BBC2 from July 21

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