Ford Madox Brown, The Last of England, c.1852–1859, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham
Birmingham has some claim to be the centre of Pre-Raphaelitism. It was the birthplace of Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), who, along with William Morris (1834–1896), provided spectacular stained glass for the city’s cathedral. Its School of Art, founded to teach design in 1843, became the UK’s first public art school in 1885. Promoting Arts and Crafts principles, it taught some of the leading figures of late Pre-Raphaelitism. Birmingham’s manufacturers produced ceramics, jewellery, and metalwork, which upheld the ideals of craftsmanship and beauty that the movement championed. The city’s Victorian businessmen and industrialists were some of the first significant collectors of Pre-Raphaelite painting. Most importantly, they supported the Art Gallery, which opened in its present form in 1885, and has amassed a collection of over 2,000 late Victorian works and objects. If you like Pre-Raphaelitism, it is the place to go. Victorian Radicals toured the US as a hugely successful temporary exhibition before Covid. Now back in Birmingham, it is an odd hybrid, essentially a showcase of the gallery’s own holdings, it is being used to lure visitors back after the museum’s four year closure, raise revenue (you are being charged admission for pictures which used to be visible for free) and has already been extended into a semi-permanent display.
The curators, however, have a big idea: to explain to a modern audience just what makes these so old-fashioned and, well, Victorian, looking artworks, so radical. It’s an uphill struggle. The opening display, set against a fashionably intense blue wall colour, features some of the most beautiful images in 19th-century painting. Yet Charles Dickens, writing in 1850, declared works by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to be the ‘lowest depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting.’ Despite good captioning, it is tough to look at John Everett Millais‘ The Blind Girl, William Holman Hunt’s (1827–1910) Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus or Arthur Hughes’ (1832–1915) The Long Engagement and see what he was getting at. The PRB’s back to basics ethos - pure colour, precisely observed detail, meaningful subjects – are all there and demonstrated in breathtaking style, but you also have obscure literature, complex symbolism and sentimentality. Occasionally the radicalism creeps in. Hughes’ Nativity, with its abstracted angel wings and claustrophobia, is an entirely new take on an old subject. Henry Wallis’ 1857 Stonebreaker is a furious indictment of poverty for all its lush beauty. Ford Madox Brown completely reinvents the landscape with his oval panorama of An English Autumn Afternoon. However, the exhibition could do far more than their tokenistic examples of William Etty David Cox, to show what the PRB were rebelling against.
Arthur Hughes, The Nativity, 1857–1858, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK.
Although the PRB itself was
short-lived, its influence was immediate and lasting. The following sections of
the exhibition examine this by looking at graphic art and sculpture - notably with
a newly acquired portrait relief of Millais by Alexander Munro - and new
followers: the Sandys siblings, Emma (1841–1877), Frederick (1829–1904) and
Simeon Solomon (1840–1905). The changing work of the members themselves is
covered, particularly Rossetti’s shift in focus to deeply personal,
aestheticist images of women, including a stunning pastel of Fanny
Cornforth, Woman with a Fan, from 1870, which has an ethereal
softness. There are gaps; for instance, Millais and Hunt’s careers are not
followed through and Elizabeth Siddal (1829–1862) is little represented,
although thankfully introduced as ‘artist’ rather than muse or model. It is the
perhaps inevitable consequence of relying solely on the gallery’s own
collections. What is noticeable in these middle sections, is how insular the
work quickly becomes: landscapes and social commentary give way to Medievalism
and fantasy.
The foil to all this Art for Arts Sake and Aestheticism should be William Morris, who along with his close friend and associate Edward Burne-Jones, carried the torch of the PRB forward. Morris was a romantic socialist who championed the ideal of the Medieval craftsman, of a society that appreciated skill and individual labour rather than factory-driven mass production. While the exhibition has good examples of Morris’ designs and is particularly strong in its use of light-box stained glass, the Arts and Crafts Movement seems too big an area to cover successfully. There are dresses, jewellery, and even a carpet, but they are displayed as individual objects rather than part of a coherent narrative. They become simply more beautiful things, and again, the radicalism, indeed any real intellectual drive, is lost.
What Victorian Radicals does showcase is the exquisite, labour-of-love book-making of Morris and his circle. Examples of Edward Moxon’s 1857 edition of Tennyson’s Poems and the Kelmscott Press’ Chaucer (1896) are accompanied by original drawings, like Rossetti’s St Cecilia: tiny, dense, and intensely erotic. An uncut woodblock of one of Burne-Jones’ illustrations gives a sense of the painstaking and time-consuming process. Although Edward Burne-Jones was a designer for Morris and Co. and produced his own pieces, like the oversized and luridly gilded Garden of the Hesperides cassone (1888), his art became increasingly detached from the real world. The Pygmalion series which tells a cautionary tale of a sculptor in love with his creation, is shown here in full, with room to breathe on a wall of rich, deep pink, and bolstered by some tenderly soft preliminary sketches. An unsettling quality is never far from Burne-Jones’ work, however, and there is an almost surreal weirdness to his late The Wizard, which seems more attuned to fin-de-siecle symbolism than the sunlit nature and exuberance of early Pre-Raphaelitism.
Kate Elizabeth Bunce, Musica (Melody), 1895–1897, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK.
The exhibition’s final section takes the story into the twentieth century with artists and designers mainly from, or trained in, Birmingham. There seems to be a deliberate attempt at celebration: a pale pepperminty wall colouring lightens the mood, and these are works of joyful colour and pattern. However, it is an uneven selection: Kate Bunce (1856–1927) and Joseph Southall (1861–1944) deserve to be better known, but there is an insipid version of Beauty and the Beast by John Dickson Batten. A few judicious loans to include, say, Evelyn de Morgan (1855–1919) or Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872–1945) would have helped here. It is easy to dismiss these artists as head-in-the-sand nostalgists, painting scenes of knights, working in tempera, and determinedly ignoring modernity. Yet, if you look at their curving, floral patterns and surface decoration, they display clear links to Art Nouveau and foreshadow the quirky Englishness of later artists like Stanley Spencer. And there is a direct link back to those first aims of purity and simplicity. Working at the time of, and apparently defiantly in the face of, modernist experiment, only the most perverse would describe these artists as Radical. But they are distinctive, unique, and, if you ignore the art historical obsession with 'the new', they are worth seeing in their own right.
Victorian Radicals tries hard to make Pre-Raphaelitism and the Arts and Crafts movement forward-thinking, radical and relevant – there is, for instance, a tagged-on section which looks at works like Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England as illustrations of contemporary issues (in this case migration). Here it feels like it is trying too hard; elsewhere there is a lack of context, so that if you are visiting without a background knowledge of Victorian academic art it is very difficult to see just what these artists were rebelling against. But even when it doesn’t succeed, Victorian Radicals reveals art and design of beauty, skill, and integrity: art to gladden the soul, and design you want to have in your life. Above all it acts as a potent reminder of the importance of Birmingham Art Gallery, and other local collections. There is great art here, there are unexpected gems; they have produced a spectacular exhibition entirely from their own holdings. I wish them every success with their full reopening.
This is an extended version of a review which appeared in Daily Art Magazine (3.6.24)
