Beauty as Protest 1845–1905

John William Inchbold, Gordale Scar, Yorkshire  exhibited 1876

Inchbold, who was born in Leeds, came under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites in the early 1850s. He established himself as one of the leading landscapists of the movement but by the end of the decade had adopted a broader, more atmospheric approach, as shown here. When it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy it was accompanied by lines from Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘Gordale’ of 1818: ‘... when the air/Glimmers with fading light .../Then, pensive Votary!, let thy feet repair/To Gordale-chasm, terrific as the lair/where the young lions couch; ...’.

Gallery label, November 2016

William Morris, News from Nowhere  2015

Anne Gaskell, Gaskell Wall Clock  1848

Ford Madox Brown, Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet  1852–6

This picture illustrates the biblical story of Christ washing his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper. It has an unusually low viewpoint and compressed space. Critics objected to the picture’s coarseness – it originally depicted Jesus only semi-clad. This caused an outcry when it was first exhibited and it remained unsold for several years until Ford Madox Brown reworked the figure in robes. Brown was never invited to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but he was a close associate of the group. Several members modelled for the disciples in this picture and the critic FG Stephens sat for Christ.

Gallery label, November 2016

Henry Wallis, Chatterton  1856

This highly romanticised picture created a sensation when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856. Thomas Chatterton was a poet whose ‘gothic’ writings, melancholy life and youthful suicide fascinated artists and writers of the 19th century. At an early age, he wrote fake medieval histories and poems, which he copied onto old parchment and passed off as manuscripts from the Middle Ages. The fraud was later discovered. In London he struggled to earn a living writing tales and songs for popular publications. Penniless, he took his own life by swallowing arsenic at the age of 17.

Gallery label, November 2016

Thomas Seddon, Jerusalem and the Valley of Jehoshaphat from the Hill of Evil Counsel  1854–5

Seddon and his friend Holman Hunt journeyed to the Holy Land in 1854, to bring greater authenticity, spiritual and topographical, to their religious works. This view, painted south of Jerusalem, shows the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane, the site of Christ’s anguish before the Crucifixion. The valley of Jehoshaphat was also believed to be where the Last Judgement would take place. Unlike John Martin’s apocalyptic visions, displayed nearby, Seddon represents the site in painstaking, sun-lit detail, paralleling the art critic John Ruskin’s remarks that ‘in following the steps of nature’, artists were ‘tracing the finger of God.’

Gallery label, March 2010

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation)  1849–50

In this radical reinterpretation of the Annunciation in which the angel announces to Mary that she will give birth to the Christ child, Rossetti sought a supernatural realism. Rejecting the tradition of representing the Virgin passively receiving the news, he shows her recoiling on her bed as if disturbed from sleep. Rossetti used white as the dominant colour to symbolise feminine purity, complemented by blue, a colour traditionally associated with Mary, and red, for Christ’s blood. The artist’s sister Christina posed for the Virgin and his brother William Michael for the angel.

Gallery label, November 2016

John William Inchbold, The Moorland (Dewar-stone, Dartmoor)  1854

Inchbold, who was born in Leeds, came under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites in the early 1850s. He established himself as one of the leading landscapists of the movement but by the end of the decade had adopted a broader, more atmospheric approach. Inchbold exhibited a watercolour of the Dewar Stone in 1850, with the subtitle 'the favourite haunt of the poet Carrington', a reference to the Devonshire poet Noel Thomas Carrington. In 1855, making a grander poetical allusion, he exhibited an oil painting titled 'The Moorland - Tennyson'. It is not known whether this was the present picture.

Gallery label, September 2004

Ford Madox Brown, Chaucer at the Court of Edward III  1856–68

This picture is a replica of Ford Madox Brown’s largest and most ambitious painting, exhibited in 1851. It was significant for its portrayal of natural sunlight and was his first attempt ‘to carry out the notion ... of treating the light and shade absolutely, as it exists at any one moment, instead of approximately or in generalized style’. This pursuit of ‘truth to nature’ was consistent with Pre-Raphaelite ideals, as was his careful workmanship. The picture’s subject, Geoffrey Chaucer, reflects the growing popularity with artists of English literature instead of more conventional classical myths and biblical tales.

Gallery label, November 2016

William Holman Hunt, F.G. Stephens  1847

This is F G Stephens. He was a friend of the artists Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown from their studies at the Royal Academy Schools. He modelled for many of their paintings and joined the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. This portrait was made before the formation of the brotherhood and it is much more loosely painted than strictly Pre-Raphaelite works.Stephens later gave up painting to work as a critic and writer. His reviews helped to advance the cause of contemporary British art and were particularly favourable to his former Pre-Raphaelite colleagues.

Gallery label, July 2007

Frederic George Stephens, The Proposal (The Marquis and Griselda)  c.1850

This is a scene from The Clerk’s Tale, one of Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales. The marquis of Saluzzo has fallen in love with a poor but beautiful peasant girl, Griselda, and is proposing marriage to her. He goes on to subject her to a series of appalling trials to test her love. But Griselda is patient and eventually wins his devotion.The background of this picture was painted from life in the kitchen of the rural lodgings that Stephens shared with his friends Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, at Knole in Kent.

Gallery label, July 2007

Frederic George Stephens, Mother and Child  c.1854

Stephens painted this in the first year of the Crimean War (1853-6) and the major world event plays out in the setting of a Victorian nursery. The child pauses playing to reach towards his mother as she reacts to a letter which brings bad news from the conflict. Stephens encloses the figures in a curved frame like a traditional Madonna and Child and employs everyday objects, such as the military toys, as symbols. Stephen’s extremely detailed Pre-Raphaelite style was time-consuming and the picture was never finished.

Gallery label, August 2018

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Proserpine  1874

In the classical myth Proserpine was kidnapped by Pluto, the god of the underworld, to be his wife. Eating food from the underworld would cause a living person to stay there forever. Proserpine ate six pomegranate seeds, and so Pluto confined her to his kingdom six months of each year. She is shown here eating a pomegranate which symbolises captivity. Jane Morris (née Burden) modelled for Proserpine. She was an embroiderer and artist’s model who was married to Rossetti’s friend William Morris and was also Rossetti’s lover.

Gallery label, August 2018

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt, Frieze of Eight Women Gathering Apples  1876

The theme of this panel would appear to be connected with the legend of the Garden of the Hesperides, a subject Burne-Jones treated on several other occasions. It may have been intended as an overmantel for a fireplace or as a decorative panel for a cassone or chest. The gold relief reflects the artist’s interest in early Renaissance art where such decoration was used extensively. The frieze may have been commissioned by the artist’s patron, the MP and collector William Graham, whose daughter Lady Horner owned a similar panel.

Gallery label, November 2016

John Brett, Lady with a Dove (Madame Loeser)  1864

Jeannette Loeser, the subject of this portrait, was romantically involved with John Brett until the spring of 1865. The portrait was largely painted in Rome in the early months of 1864, and completed in London in August that year. The wing of the dove echoes the curved outline of the sitter’s skirt, and the dove motif is repeated in the mosaic brooch on her shoulder. Each corner of the frame is decorated with a winged cherub that looks into the picture as if in admiration of her beauty.

Gallery label, November 2016

William Holman Hunt, Our English Coasts, 1852 (‘Strayed Sheep’)  1852

The location shown in this painting is the Lovers’ Seat, an idyllic spot at Fairlight Glen near Hastings in Sussex. Hunt laboured here from mid-August to December 1852, enduring rain, wind and bitter cold to master his view. Despite the changes in weather, the painting seems a credible replication of particular illuminated moment. The colours used to convey light are daringly juxtaposed in order to intensify the clarity of every surface, a method that astounded audiences on both sides of the Channel.

Gallery label, November 2016

Arthur Hughes, The Eve of St Agnes  1856

This work was based on John Keats's poem The Eve of St Agnes (1820), inspired by the folk belief that a woman can see her future husband in a dream if she performs certain rites the day before the feast of St. Agnes, the patron saint of virgins. The frame is inscribed with the fourth verse of the poem, which sets the scene for the three episodes which Hughes depicts. First, Porphyro defies Madeleine’s family to approach the castle, where a banquet is in progress. He then awakens Madeline from her dreams. Finally, the lovers silently escape from the dark castle into the night.

Gallery label, March 2022

Henry Wallis, The Room in Which Shakespeare Was Born  1853

Wallis launched his career exhibiting a sequence of paintings of interior scenes connected with the life of playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616). This one shows Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. It is based on a biography by Charles Knight written in 1842. It describes ‘the mean room, with its massive joists and plastered walls, firm with ribs of oak’. Wallis has painted the room in detail, including every nail securing the floorboards. He has also taken note of Knight’s passage describing how ‘hundreds amongst the hundreds of thousands by whom that name is honoured have inscribed their names on the walls of the room.’

Gallery label, June 2019

John Brett, Florence from Bellosguardo  1863

Brett became a student at the Royal Academy in 1853. Here he was influenced by the work of the Pre-Raphaelites and the writings of their most powerful supporter, John Ruskin. His earliest pictures in the Pre-Raphaelite style were much praised by Ruskin. During the winters of 1861-2 and 1862-3, he stayed in Florence where he painted this picture. It shows the city from the south-west looking towards Fiesole and the Appenines. The picture adheres strictly to the principle of 'truth to nature' and is a rare example of Pre-Raphaelite townscape.

Gallery label, August 2004

William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience  1853

Hunt’s modern life painting represents a wealthy man visiting his mistress in an apartment which he has provided for her. The tune that he idly plays on the piano has reminded her of her earlier life and she rises from his lap towards the bright outside world (made visible to the viewer in the mirror). The claustrophobic space is filled with intricate clues, such as the bird trying to escape from a cat and the female figure enclosed in a glass dome, which echoes the shape of the painting.

Gallery label, November 2016

Thomas Woolner, Puck  1845–7

Puck is a mischievous invisible fairy in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Thomas Woolner has illustrated a scene here from an ‘Imaginary Biography’ of Puck. He alights on a mushroom to save a sleeping frog from a hungry snake. The sculpture captures the instant before a sudden movement – as Puck touches the frog with his foot it will jump away just before the snake attacks.Ideal or poetic subjects drawn from literature, mythology or history, were highly regarded by sculptors in the mid-nineteenth century.

Gallery label, July 2007

Arthur Hughes, The Singer  1866

Joanna Mary Wells, Portrait of Sidney Wells  1859

Joanna Mary Wells painted this portrait of her second child, Sidney, while he was still less than a year old. Such a young baby must have been impossible to keep still, which probably explains the difficulty she experienced in seizing a likeness.This has been interpreted as a highly personal work, possibly because of its small icon-like format. It also became a very poignant image after the early deaths of both Sidney and Joanna Mary Wells.

Gallery label, July 2007

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, The Châtelaine  exhibited 1904

The Châtelaine (a French word for a noble woman who is mistress of a castle) is a polychrome, gilded statuette encrusted with semi-precious stones, set on a wooden base with turrets at its four corners and decorated with small Italianate landscapes on all four of its sides. Made of finely modelled plaster, the sculpture is richly patterned, painted and patinated. It represents a noble woman wearing a medieval ‘Balzo’ headdress and an opulent black and gold damask dress lined with red. Her estate is signified by a prominent set of heavy keys hanging from the green purse on her right side. Her face expresses sorrow and her hands are clasped in prayer or anguish. Despite the French title of the work, the figure’s style of dress appears to be Florentine, which is in accord with the Tuscany landscapes that are painted with gold leaf on the wooden base of the sculpture, in the manner of the so-called ‘predella’ scenes situated below sixteenth-century altarpieces. One of them represents a walled city, another a property with cypress trees; a third depicts a more generic landscape and the last one a shore approached by several ships.

Morris & Co. (London, UK), Pipernel design, wallpaper book  1917–1939

Arthur Hughes, Elaine with the Armour of Launcelot  1867

Sir John Everett Millais, Bt, Ophelia  1851–2

This work shows the death of Ophelia, a scene from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. Traumatised when Hamlet breaks off their betrothal and accidentally kills her father, she allows herself to fall into a stream and drown. The flowers she has been collecting symbolise her story, the poppies representing death. Millais painted the lonely setting leaf-by-leaf over many months by the Hogsmill River, Surrey. Afterwards, the artist, poet and model Elizabeth Siddall posed in a wedding dress in a bath of water at Millais's studio. Through the painting, Millais critiqued the Victorian practice of occasionally arranging marriages for money and status.

Gallery label, March 2022

Arthur Hughes, April Love  1855–6

Hughes’s painting shows a moment of tension between a young couple. The woman turns away from the barely visible male figure, bent over her left hand. Like many Victorian artists, Hughes used the language of flowers in his work. The overgrown ivy that also decorates the frame signifies loyalty and eternal life, and roses, love. The petals strewn on the floor may reflect that the love affair has been strained, but the ivy suggests a positive outcome. It is thought that Tryphena Ford modelled for the painting. Hughes married Ford, ‘his early and only love’, in 1855, the year he made this painting.

Gallery label, November 2019

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix  c.1864–70

Rossetti’s inspiration was Dante’s La Vita Nuova (‘The New Life’), which explores the Italian poet’s idealised love for Beatrice and her premature death. As an omen of death, a bird drops a white poppy between her open hands. In the background the ghostly Dante gazes towards the figure of Love. Rossetti viewed this as a memorial to his wife and the model for Beatrice, Elizabeth Siddall, who had died in 1862. Rossetti had buried the manuscripts of his unpublished poems including On the Vita Nuova of Dante with his wife but, in a macabre twist, retrieved and published them in 1870.

Gallery label, November 2016

Sir John Everett Millais, Bt, Christ in the House of His Parents (‘The Carpenter’s Shop’)  1849–50

This picture was exhibited with words from the Old Testament, often seen as prefiguring Christ’s Crucifixion: ‘And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then shall he answer. Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.’ Millais based the setting on a real carpenter’s shop. Symbols of the Crucifixion figure prominently: the wood, the nails, the cut in Christ’s hand and the blood on his foot. Millais was viciously attacked in the press for showing the holy family as ‘ordinary’. Charles Dickens described Christ as ‘a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-haired boy in a night-gown.’

Gallery label, November 2016