Ashmolean Museum, Autumn 2022
This may be an heretical viewpoint, but frankly I’ve often thought that many of the Pre-Raphaelites could draw better than they could paint. Not that I’m suggesting that they couldn’t do a bang up job of getting paint onto canvas, they certainly could do that without any problem at all. What they found a lot more problematic I think was doing so and retaining much in the way of life and spontaneity. What this exhibition demonstrates, in spades, is that give them a pencil or a bit of chalk and the back of an envelope (literally, in once case which we’ll come to later) and they were so much lighter and lifelike.
Naturally, I’m not (before you hit the comments section) saying ALL paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites are wooden and lifeless, of course they’re not. But many of them, in their way, are. The young couple in The Hireling Shepard are just wooden, the couple in Last of England look constipated and pretty much any Rossetti heroine looks about as believable as human being as somebody who makes their money as an Instagram influencer. When you consider that the espoused aim of the group was to achieve a more natural and genuine style. So, before we go further, let’s take aim with something pretty high calibre at one of the greats: Ophelia is about as unrealistic as it gets. Go on, take a look at it, enjoy the whole thing because it’s a great painting…then pop online and search for images of drowning victims (or not, it’s pretty dire). Millais Ophelia does not look like somebody who has been driven mad, hurls herself in a river and drowns. She looks like a cute girl who’s been paid to lie in a bath.
A trip round this exhibition though will show that these were folks who could draw easily and fluently, and whose drawings are full of life and realism. One thing which strikes the viewer is actually how small they are, while they’re beautifully done they’re very much thumbnail sketches of friends and family clearly done spontaneously and for fun, these are not drawings for posterity or the market, they’re drawings for the sake of drawings. Along with these you get to see a lot of the preparatory sketches for the big oil paintings: yes the Light of the World really did start out, literally, on the back of an envelope. You can see them thinking their way to the final compositions. Ruskin by his waterfall is there in preparatory sketch form, for which the caption writer has commented that he looks more relaxed and happy. Probably at that point he didn’t realise quite what was going on between Millais and Effie, though I’m tempted to suggest that Millais could easily have painted Ruskin as a more relaxed figure the way he sketched him and just maybe the painting says more about Millais’ feelings towards him (one assumes that Millais, if nobody else, knew the truth about what freaked Ruskin out when Effie peeled off) than it does about Ruskin’s feelings towards Millais
Nice also to see some of Lizzie Siddal’s drawings in the show to prove that given half a chance she could have been no mean artist herself. In fact female artists were quite well represented – though as my wife pointed out of one (the name of whom I’ve unforgivably failed to write down) while the blokes were painting she was having a large number of children AND campaigning for a number of social reform causes AND painting!
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