9781422271810

THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

relaxing hands; it is a white poppy, because Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife, Elizabeth Siddal, died of an overdose of laudanum, an opiate. The painting was also a memorial to her, and in a later letter, Rossetti wrote that “the picture must of course not be viewed as a representation of the incident of the death of Beatrice but as an ideal of the subject, symbolized by a trance or sudden spiritual transfiguration.” In the background, on the right, Dante gazes across to the figure of love on the left.

PLATE 2 Beata Beatrix (1863) Dante Gabriel Rossetti Oil on canvas, 34 x 26 inches (86.5 x 66 cm)

The poet Dante was an important figure of influence and inspiration to the Rossetti family, and this work represents the death of Dante’s Beatrice, who sits trance like while the messenger of death in the shape of a bird drops a poppy, a symbol of remembrance, into her

provide evidence of the strong public desire for parliamentary and legal reform. In the event, the meeting was something of a fiasco, but it did attract the interest of many young Reformist enthusiasts, among them two young students from the Royal Academy Schools in central London who traveled on foot to the meeting. It is important to emphasize the artistic revolution they contemplated—without at that moment knowing what it should be. The movement that quickly originated from this youthful enthusiasm was one of the most significant in the formation of a new philosophy of painting that, despite the short life of the movement, actually did initiate changes that had a profound effect on British painting after the mid-nineteenth century. While for us in the twenty-first century the Modern Revolution in painting is more often seen to have begun with Impressionism in France about twenty years later than the Pre-Raphaelites in Britain, the beginnings of great changes can be discerned much earlier in France at the time of the revolution itself. The court art of Louis XV, of Boucher, Fragonard, and Lancret, represented all that the ordinary people most detested and that the intellectual politicians of the Revolution wished to replace with an art of social responsibility after the

salacious frivolity of royal privilege. At least that is how they perceived it, and an alternative was available in what is called Neo-Classicism. Its leader was Jacques-Louis David, a friend of Robespierre and a supporter of the Revolution, who created moral tracts espousing the cause of the Revolution in pictorial form. It was the beginning, not only of a new way of painting and new subject matter, but also the introduction of a new seriousness of purpose reflected in a determined Historicism. The subjects were taken largely from Roman history, thus enlarging the discussion of what constituted the proper role of art. It is not possible, in this short introduction, to pursue this matter through the various developments that occurred during the first half of the nineteenth century in France, but it is important to emphasize that the visual arts were in a process of change through the whole of the century, up to and following the Impressionists. The situation in British art was different. From the beginning of the century, a number of figures had emerged whose stature and influence in the arts was considerable. A realism in the treatment of nature—on the one hand, romantic with J.M.W. Turner, academic with John Constable, and spiritual or mystical with William Blake—had appeared in British painting without a

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