London, April 10, 1848. Shops had been barricaded and extra policemen shipped into the capital. Thousands of un-enfranchised working men were rallying under the Chartist banner, marching on Whitehall. Two young artists decided to join the throng: 19-year-old John Everett Millais, and 21-year-old William Holman Hunt. Within a year they, too, would be marked out as anti-Establishment agitators, waving their own banner of reform. Their target was not Parliament but the art world. They would become known as the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood.
Looking at Pre-Raphaelite pictures today, with their literary, mythical or religious scenes so often littered with dreamy, long-haired women, it is hard to see them as the product of rebellious minds. But 160 years ago these pictures shook the foundations of the British art establishment, drawing criticism that secured initial notoriety and ultimate fame for the artists. That the brotherhood members went on to enjoy bohemian liaisons with the models so frequently featured in their work cemented their profile in a society as infatuated with celebrity and scandal as it is today.
As students of the Royal Academy Schools, Millais and Hunt had been taught to paint in what was known as the Grand Manner, a style based on that of the Renaissance master Raphael, in which idealised visions of human beauty were set within stylised Italianate landscapes. But in 1848, the so-called year of revolutions in Europe, the brotherhood artists, barely out of art school, ripped up the rule book and chucked out idealisation in favour of realism, and impact.
Hunt — nicknamed “mad” or “maniac” because of his fearless determination — was perhaps the classic revolutionary. Born in Cheapside, East London, the son of a warehouseman, he had already confounded his family’s ambitions to apprentice him in the City by attaining a place at the Royal Academy through sheer drive and sacrifice. Living in a Soho dive, he was the epitome of the starving artist.
Millais was a more surprising rebel. Living comfortably with his family in Gower Street, he had been a juvenile celebrity who, having entered the Royal Academy at the unprecedented age of 11, was still fondly known as “the child” by the press, which had been following his career ever since.
In May 1848 Hunt met the 20-year-old Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and in doing so the Pre-Raphaelites found their evangelist. Rossetti hadn’t been on the Chartist march because he had been confined to bed with a bad case of boils. But he had been there in spirit, written a poem about the event and sent it to a newspaper for publication. Rossetti, a Royal Academy drop-out and emerging poet, had been christened Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, but had rearranged his forenames for effect. Languid and long-haired, he had the bohemian credentials that completed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s founding triumvirate.
It may well have been Rossetti who formulated the notion of a brotherhood as an instrument of rebellion. Dante’s father, the Italian poet Gabriele Rossetti, had once been a member of a secret revolutionary sect in Naples, the Carbonari. What is clear is that one night Millais, Hunt and Rossetti found themselves admiring engravings of medieval frescos from the Campo Santo in Pisa. It was the realism and “honesty” of the frescoes, from an era predating Raphael, that the three found refreshing. By the end of the evening the Pre-Raphaelite banner had been adopted.
When the brotherhood’s work emerged at the Royal Academy annual shows between 1849 and 1851 it attracted cries of outrage. Perhaps their most vociferous critic was Charles Dickens, who, in 1850, dedicated the front page of his magazine Household Words to a demolition of the brotherhood and, in particular, the religious canvas Christ in the House of his Parents by Millais. The picture hangs in Tate Britain. It is an imaginative depiction of Joseph’s carpentry workshop: Jesus, a mere boy, has cut his hand and is being comforted by a careworn Mary and a middle-aged Joseph. Though light-filled and brightly coloured, the picture is steeped in death: Jesus’s wound signals his Crucifixion; his simple white cotton garment is shroud-like. Our modern eyes quickly appreciate the almost photographic realism with which Millais portrays this humble working family. But Dickens, of a generation that equated art with beauty, could see little value in imagined verisimilitude.
He ridiculed the work, describing Christ as “a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed-gown, who appears to have received a poke in the hand . . . ”
Although the brotherhood’s output often returned to religious subjects, as libido-driven young men they were also highly sensitive to poems or myths, the depiction of which would allow them to explore human sexuality. Unrequited love, illegal love, sensual love and the conflict between class and love became staple fascinations. If Dickens had looked more closely at Millais’s Lorenzo and Isabella, executed in 1849, now hanging in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, he would have had far more to be outraged about.
Based on Keats’s poem Isabella; or the Pot of Basil, the picture draws on the story of Lorenzo, a humble apprentice, who falls for the higher-class Isabella. Her brothers disapprove and murder Lorenzo. Millais imagines a dinner that precedes the murder. At the table, one brother kicks out at a dog. His leg is frozen as it points to his sister’s groin. The same brother stares threateningly at Lorenzo, holding a nutcracker in his hand.While this seems to indicate his desire to emasculate Lorenzo, the motive for such a desire is indicated by a shadow on the tablecloth that looks like an erect penis rising from his lap. This reference to brooding incestuous desire and sexual jealousy is, even by today’s standards, quite something.
Pre-Raphaelite pictures are rife with sexual symbolism and subtext. Millais went on to paint The Bridesmaid, who sits passing her fingers through a ring, a huge phallic salt cellar at her side to indicate her own sexual longings. The same salt cellar appears in the background of his Mariana, a picture about a woman abandoned by her fiancé and facing spinsterhood. And his most famous painting, Ophelia, links sex and death: the Shakespearian heroine is almost orgasmic as she abandons herself in the moment of suicide by drowning.
Rossetti began his career painting an Annunciation scene in which a semi-naked Gabriel greets a terrified Virgin Mary. The picture, in Tate Britain, shows the Virgin clad only in a nightgown and recoiling in fear while the muscular angel points a lily at her groin. The psychological subtext is sexual tension, expectation and apprehension.
If Millais and Rossetti’s work offered psychological explorations of sex, Hunt chewed over the subject in a more political vein. He created a stir by placing a prostitute centre stage in his picture The Awakening Conscience. Showing her rising up from her client’s lap at the moment that she grasps the precariousness of her situation, his picture was an explicit comment on the huge amount of prostitution in the capital at the time. The picture was all the more shocking since Hunt was having a relationship with Annie Miller, the prostitute who modelled for the picture.
Miller was one of a group of lower-class girls recruited by the Pre-Raphaelites as part of a campaign to replace the demure oval-faced women that graced other Victorian canvases with something more distinctive. The brotherhood would encircle shop girls walking to work, or whores looking for business, and solicit their services as models. One woman, Alexa Wilding, was chased down the Strand by Rossetti. Another, Lizzie Siddal, was discovered in a hat shop just off Leicester Square. This unconventional approach to recruiting models was matched by the equally unconventional relationships the artists developed with the girls. But the brotherhood’s difficulty in resolving their sexual adventures within marriage proved a source of much tragedy within their circle.
Addressing the moral issue highlighted by his own “awakening conscience”, Hunt decided to educate Annie Miller and marry her, once her p’s and q’s were up to scratch.
Unfortunately, before Miller could benefit from her elocution lessons she had an affair with an increasingly licentious Rossetti that put paid to her prospects with Hunt and sounded the death knell for Hunt and Rossetti’s relationship. Meanwhile, Siddal, Rossetti’s working-class lover, had to hang around for a decade and suffer his infidelities with other models, such as the good-time girl Fanny Cornforth, Jane Burden, a sometime violet seller, and the actress Ruth Herbert. Siddal committed suicide two years after becoming Mrs Rossetti.
Millais, meanwhile, found himself at the centre one of the biggest sexual scandals of the century. Befriended by the eminent critic and patron John Ruskin, Millais used Ruskin’s wife, Effie, as a model for one of his pictures, The Order of Release. A flirtation between the two intensified when, during a holiday with the Ruskins, Millais discovered that, despite five years of marriage, Effie remained a virgin. Amid gossip that Ruskin’s reticence was on account of a dislike of female pubic hair, the Ruskin marriage was annulled on the grounds of non-consummation and Effie became Mrs Millais. Victorian society was so agog with this story that one contemporary observer suggested that it had become more discussed than the Crimean War.
It is tempting to see the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as a 19th-century prototype for those Young British Artists that would shock in their wake more than 100 years later. Graduating from Goldsmiths, drinking at the Groucho and patronised by Charles Saatchi, they, too, were determined to make a stir. Their hedonistic private lives aside, sex and death were a constant preoccupation in their works — Damien Hirst’s shark, for example, or Tracey Emin’s bed — that, just like those of their Victorian predecessors, were executed in a spirit of self-conscious avant-gardism.
While it is enlightening to revisit brotherhood pictures with this in mind, the real relevance of Pre-Raphaelite art is in its compelling examination of sex and the human condition, rendered, in Millais’s case at least, with a technical skill that remains rare. That their own private adventures offer us just as good material as their art can only add to their irresistible appeal.
Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives of the Pre-Raphaelites, by Franny Moyle, is published by John Murray. A six-part TV drama adaptation, co-created by Franny Moyle, begins on BBC Two on Tuesday
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