Rebels of Art and Science John Holmes Explores the Empirical Underlay to Pre-Raphaelite Masterworks

Home , Alfred Waterhouse, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Frederic George Stephens, Our English Coasts, The Germ (periodical)

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To paint Ophelia (1851–52), John Millais spent months observing plants on the banks of the Hogsmill River in Surrey, UK.

HISTORY Rebels of art and science John Holmes explores the empirical underlay to Pre-Raphaelite masterworks.

xtraordinary advances in science, Edward Burne-Jones to open a window Stephens remarked that since the early technology and industry shaped the Tate Britain, London. on an exquisitely 1800s, disciplines such as chemistry had Victorian age; alongside that grew a Until 24 February 2019. romanticized fan- made astonishing progress “by bringing Enew experimentalism in literature and the tasy world caught in greater knowledge to bear upon a wider arts. From 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite Brother- moments of stillness. But John Ruskin, the range of experiment”, and pursuing pre- hood, a group of British artists founded by era’s leading art critic and a serious amateur cision. Why, he asked, shouldn’t the same Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman geologist and botanist, saw something else methods benefit the arts’ “moral purposes”? Hunt and John Everett Millais, began to there. In 1884, he wrote that, although the How did the group harness empirical weave science into their art. They sought a brotherhood’s work might “seem to be the methods to create its work? Take arguably new aesthetic even as they called for art to reaction of a desperate fancy … against the the most famous Pre-Raphaelite painting, model itself on science — and were cham- incisive scepticism of recent science”, they Millais’s Ophelia (1851–25). At first glance, pioned by scientific luminaries from the were in fact “a part of that science itself”. this seems a sentimental portrayal of the comparative anatomist Richard Owen to Ruskin supported the Pre-Raphaelites and tragic suicide of the character in William physician Henry Acland. knew them well. Shakespeare’s Hamlet. However, every plant The Pre-Raphaelites rejected the From the start, they insisted on working depicted, from purple loosestrife to wild insistence of the Royal Academy of Arts in “from absolute data of fact” and acute roses, is the product of more than three London that artists should learn by imitating observation, as the critic William Michael months of painstaking observation as Millais the paintings of Raphael. Modern interest in Rossetti — brother of Dante Gabriel and worked on the banks of the Hogsmill River the group has grown steadily since a revival poet Christina Rossetti — explained in in Surrey. Other artists had painted in the among the counter-culture of the 1960s. the magazine The Spectator in 1851. He open air before, but never in such meticu- That is newly reflected in a retrospective noted that the group conducted “investi- lously wrought detail. on the work of Edward Burne-Jones (who, gations” through art, and offered the pub- This became a collective experiment to with Rossetti and William Morris, formed lic “unflinching avowal of the result”. A discover what painting, pushed to its lim- the ‘second-wave’ Pre-Raphaelite move- year previously, Pre-Raphaelite art critic its, could reveal. Each new work would ment) at Tate Britain in London. Burne- Frederic George Stephens had spelt out press further, recording exact effects of light Jones’s paintings, such as the 1880s Briar the group’s commitment to these princi- and shade, as in Hunt’s 1851 The Hireling Rose series featured in the exhibition, seem ples in its short-lived periodical The Germ. Shepherd; or ecological relationships and

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animal behaviour, as in the straying sheep opposition to the group, as were mainstream History stands as one of the best and most of his 1852 Our English Coasts; or skin tones journalists. Charles Dickens called Millais’s surprising collections of Victorian public in full sunlight, as in Ford Madox Brown’s provocative 1849–50 painting Christ in the sculpture, and the only one dedicated to The Pretty Baa-Lambs (1851). Subjects House of His Parents “odious, repulsive, science. were scrupulously researched. Hunt visited and revolting”. By contrast, many Victorian Woolner went on to collaborate with the Jerusalem and the Dead Sea to study the scientists supported the brotherhood. The architect Alfred Waterhouse. When Water- landscape, people and latest archaeological naturalist William Broderip, who bought house built the commanding Natural His- findings for his paintings of the life of Jesus. The Hireling Shepherd, introduced Hunt tory Museum in London for Owen in the Looking more closely at Ophelia, we to Owen, founder of the Natural History 1870s, they again applied Pre-Raphaelite see a study of physical and psychologi- Museum in London (and coiner of the word principles. Owen supplied Waterhouse cal phenomena. Millais asked his model, ‘dinosaur’). Owen became a staunch advo- with specimens from the vivarium and Elizabeth Siddall — poet, artist, and later cate of the Pre-Raphaelites, and delighted illustrations of extinct animals as models Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife — to lie in a in showing Millais and his children around for the terracotta menagerie that adorns the bath fully dressed. Candles were set under the British Museum’s natural-history collec- museum’s facade. Waterhouse paid tribute the bath for warmth. Millais’s concentra- tions. In 1881, Hunt painted the magnificent to Owen by including ancient fauna he had tion was such in his epic eight-hour bout of portrait of Owen now in the Natural History described, such as the archaeopteryx and the painting that he failed to notice when they Museum. palaeotherium. went out; Siddall caught a severe chill and Acland, one of Owen’s students and from It was also Woolner who made the Pre- he paid the doctor’s bill. Siddall thus paid a 1858 the Regius Professor of Medicine at the Raphaelites’ most direct contribution to price for Millais’ ‘laboratory conditions’, but University of Oxford, was even more central science. When carving a bust of Charles the method did enable him to capture how to the movement. When he and Ruskin cam- Darwin (now in the herbarium at the Uni- hair and fabric float on and underneath the paigned in the 1850s for a natural-history versity of Cambridge), Woolner alerted the surface of water. museum in Oxford, Acland declared that it biologist to a small protuberance some- Ophelia’s expression in the painting is also would be decorated on Pre-Raphaelite prin- times visible inside the rim of the human revealing. The Pre-Raphaelites were rightly ciples. The stone- ear, known as the auricular tubercle. In the scathing about the state of psychology in “Many Victorian work was based 1840s, when devising a statuette of Puck 1850, when phrenology and physiognomy scientists on real plants and from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s still passed as sciences. Stephens called it animals, carved in Dream, Woolner had observed that the fea- “dry operose quackery ... mere chaff not supported the minute detail by ture also appears in monkeys, as pointed studied from nature, and therefore worth- brotherhood.” unsung heroes of ears. Both Darwin and Woolner recog- less, never felt, and therefore useless”. They Victorian sculpture nized this physiological phenomenon as set out to study the mind through art instead, John and James O’Shea. The stone columns evidence of human evolution from earlier refining their designs as they thought around the central court were geological primates, and Darwin — dubbing it the through the mental states of their subjects. samples drawn from quarries around Brit- ‘Woolnerian tip’ — mentioned it in The An early drawing for Ophelia, now in the ain to illustrate different periods of Earth’s Descent of Man (1871). Plymouth City Museum, is melodramatic. history. The court was surrounded by statues Woolner finished the bust in 1869. The In the finished painting, we see a much more of scientists at work, from Galileo Galilei to same year, the astronomer Norman Lockyer subtle analysis: Ophelia subdued by despair, James Watt. Rossetti advised on the project; founded a new periodical — Nature. Lockyer sinking into unconsciousness as she drowns. Ruskin and Siddall, among others, contrib- had Pre-Raphaelite connections, too: he had When Stephens argued that scientific meth- uted designs. Thomas Woolner, the broth- worked with William Rossetti on an earlier ods could advance art’s moral purpose, this erhood’s only sculptor, with the group’s journal, The Reader; befriended Hunt; and is what he meant: it helps us to understand close collaborators John Lucas Tupper and employed Pre-Raphaelite landscape painter humanity and nature. Alexander Munro, fashioned the sculptures. John Brett to accompany an expedition to The art establishment was crushing in its The Oxford University Museum of Natural Sicily to study the solar eclipse in 1870. In 1878, Lockyer wrote a series of articles on ‘Physical Science for Artists’, setting out guidance in optics and assessing paintings OUMNH from the latest Royal Academy exhibition on grounds of scientific accuracy. In Nature, Lockyer held artists to exacting scientific standards, just as Stephens had done in The Germ. The Pre-Raphaelites launched the most radical and ultimately the most influen- tial Victorian art movement, inspiring the European symbolists and the Arts and Crafts movement led by Burne-Jones’s great asso- ciate, William Morris. They also took their lead from — and shaped the culture of — Victorian science, and affected its legacy to this day. ■

John Holmes is professor of Victorian literature and culture at the University of Birmingham, UK. His latest book is The Pre-Raphaelites and Science. Ferns carved by James O’Shea top a column at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. e-mail: [email protected]