9781422271810

MASTERS OF ART

PLATE 3 Bocca Baciata (1859) Dante Gabriel Rossetti Oil on canvas, 12 1 ⁄ 2 x 6 2 ⁄

3 inches (32 x 27 cm)

This painting was crafted at a turning point in Rossetti’s career. It was his first work of a single female figure. Rossetti established this style that was later to become the signature of his work. The model was Fanny Cornforth, the principal inspiration for Rossetti’s sensuous and beautiful figures.

parallel in France. By the time the Pre-Raphaelites were formed in 1848, there was considerable uncertainty within the art establishment as to the future direction of painting. Some positive direction was needed, some standards established. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with its mysterious cryptogram “PRB” appearing on its paintings, provided a different if unspecified direction. It seemed to be concerned with a new form of Realism, part spiritually motivated, part presenting a new sense of actuality. One of the difficulties inherent in any study of the Brotherhood derives, for instance, from the fact that what the Pre-Raphaelites inaugurated was so quickly adopted or assimilated into the generality of later Victorian painting that it is not immediately evident to the observer which are Pre-Raphaelite paintings, which are influenced by the movement, and which have absorbed enough of the technique and philosophy for different pictorial ends. The disentanglement of this complex scene is not easy, and every writer on the subject will make different selections to illustrate particular points from a plethora of work available. The choice is therefore a personal one and with so much to choose from is unavoidably limited.

It has been necessary to concentrate on the central, most important figures of the Brotherhood itself as well as some of its followers. Since its foundation in the eighteenth century under the presidency of Sir Joshua Reynolds, a determined intellectual Classicist, the Royal Academy had assumed an authority over the standards of British art and became the recognized home of academic excellence. It would not have seemed appropriate for artists, during this early period, to have joined in with groups or movements. Their ambition would have been individual acceptance within the official system: to become a member of the Royal Academy (RA) or, in France, the Académie and the annual Salon. As a result, it is something of a surprise to encounter, in 1848, the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, secretly devoted to a revolutionary artistic program that became, in the event, the first of the significantly influential art movements of the century. The Brotherhood comprised three highly talented painters, one less talented, one described as a painter who left no paintings, a sculptor, and the brother of one of the three who became a writer and art critic and the

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