After four years of closure, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has partially reopened to welcome the city’s pre-Raphaelites back from a tour of the US. Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement features familiar crowd-pleasers. Henry Wallis’s tiny portrait of Chatterton (1855-56) shows the poet sprawling exquisitely on his deathbed in modish mauve britches. Frederick Sandys’s furious wronged Medea (1866-68) clutches at her coral beads as she mutters incantations over her crucible. In other paintings, models Jane Morris and Fanny Cornforth give good hair.
A section of this exhibition also asks how future audiences might want to think about the pre-Raphaelites in new ways – perhaps in relation to migration, colonialism and representation. I want to think about the pre-Raphaelites in new ways, too. As a first step: to dispense with art world snobbery that places them beyond the pale. They are condemned for various sins: their excesses, their sentiment, their emotion. I want to ask how much the snobbery in fact stems from their popularity, and their particular appeal to the young, the queer and the romantically inclined. They are often framed as a guilty pleasure, but we shouldn’t need to feel guilty about the art we like.
Charting three generations of British artists, Victorian Radicals opens with the wider context of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed as a secret society in 1848. Star of the opening section is Ford Madox Brown who, though not an official member of the PRB, briefly taught Dante Gabriel Rossetti (does that make him a pre-pre-Raphaelite?).
The Pretty Baa-Lambs (1851-59) shows Madox Brown’s lover Emma Hill carrying their baby daughter in then-bucolic Stockwell in London. Rendered in startling colour, this sentimental family scene was painted outdoors and raised eyebrows for the sunburnt flush of Hill’s cheeks.
The radicalism of the title is not always palpable. In their earliest incarnation, the pre-Raphaelite were indeed rebels. Their preference for heightened colour and emotion, and realistic (rather than glorified) figures were ridiculed, most famously by Charles Dickens.
The “second wave” that emerged under Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s influence a decade later, however, found the pre-Raphaelites in their sensual pomp. This central section is dominated by Rossetti’s unfinished portrait of Jane Morris, La Donna della Finestra (1881). Her powerfully androgynous face and clouds of dark hair float on an ochre background above disembodied hands. Simeon Solomon’s Bacchus (1867) is a meltingly beautiful Italian youth clutching a thyrsus (staff) laden with grapes.
Edward Burne-Jones’s four panel paintings of Pygmalion run heavy with subtext. Pygmalion was an artist who foreswore mortal women but fell in love with his own sculpture. This, it seems to me, is the thrust of pre-Raphaelite work in this most libidinal phase – the construction of fantasies so intoxicating that you want to climb inside them.
Radicalism in this era was supplied by the socialist William Morris, who established a craft-centric business producing textiles, wallpapers, tapestries and furnishings. A number are shown, including illuminated stained-glass panels. The intermingling of art and crafts is embodied by William Arthur Smith Benson, a handsome designer who acted as the model for Burne-Jones’s Pygmalion while knocking out fancy metal tea sets in his day job. Benson was a founder of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society and took over Morris & Co after Morris’s death in 1896.
In showing decorative arts, fashions and craft alongside paintings, Victorian Radicals looks at the pre-Raphaelites in relation to industry. Manufacturing goods to supply Britain’s vast trading empire provided the wealth that placed so much of this work in our museums in the late 19th century. Industrial developments helped the pre-Raphaelites paint their medieval fantasies. Aniline dyes permitted cloth to be made in intense mauves and greens, transforming women’s fashions. New pigments were available to help artists paint the natural world in jewel-bright colours.
Birmingham-born Burne-Jones is the lodestar of the show’s final section, inspiring the romantic Birmingham Group that emerged out of the city’s School of Art in the 1890s. In their hands, the pre-Raphaelite’s medieval tendencies got trippy to the point of cosplay. They favoured old-fashioned tempera paint and populated one another’s tightly packed compositions. Joseph Edward Southall’s New Lamps for Old (1900-01) has roles played by his future wife Anna Elizabeth Baker and artist Arthur Gaskin. Kate Bunce painted artist Mary Powell as the figure of Musica (c 1895-97) wearing Birmingham-made arts and crafts jewellery. An image of a tight-knit scene emerges: an alliance of idealistic artists and designers working in the city at the turn of the 20th century.
In their nostalgia for an imaginary past, in their lavish world-building, the pre-Raphaelites speak strongly to our own time: one in which “romantasy” rules the fiction charts, and the screen is strewn with sprawling medieval-esque dramas. If we are invited to think about the pre-Raphaelites in new ways, this is an intriguing place to start.
• Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement is at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery until 31 October.
