Among wombats and redheads

The Pre-Raphaelites was a secretive “band of brothers” who started out as rebels against the British art establishment (including one Sir Sloshua), only to become the new establishment, dominating the art scene of perfidious Albion until about 1900. In the popular imagination, Pre-Raphaelite art is usually pictured as “a mysterious redhead in a medieval setting”. Although this is a stereotype, there is some truth to it. Nor is the reputation of the PRB painters as eccentrics and womanizers entirely unfounded, I mean, one of them *did* elope with John Ruskin's wife shortly after painting Ruskin's portrait! Another one lived in a house surrounded by a garden inhabited by exotic animals, including wombats and, if memory serves me right, kangaroos.

But if *this* is what interests you most about John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the other faux medievalist rebels against the Academy, you might get sorely disappointed by Christopher Wood's more civilized take on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He purposely emphasizes their art rather than their love lives (or interest in Australian marsupials), and the book is therefore dominated by lavish reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite paintings (most of them in color). Wood also points out that Pre-Raphaelism had two distinct phases, with the later phase, during which the Pre-Raphaelites fused with the broader Aesthetic Movement around William Morris, usually being neglected by modern writers. To remedy this, the author has included more material on this phase, including the artwork of Edward Burne-Jones.

I admit that I never quite grasped the point of Pre-Raphaelism. According to Wood, Millais & Co were paradoxical in many ways. While wanting to paint as realistically as possible, they usually chose medieval or literary themes as their motifs. Ironically, this often led to accusations of Catholic tendencies! Contradicting this, Charles Dickens condemned Millais' painting “Christ in the house of his parents” (with its strong carpenter shop realism) as “mean, repulsive and revolting”. Occasionally, though, the Pre-Raphaelites also ventured into the field of social critique, for instance Hunt's “The Awakening Conscience”, here interpreted as a painting attacking prostitution (although I suspect modern feminists might found the work sexist). During the second phase, when Pre-Raphaelism became part of a broader and more syncretistic current, the movement spread into furniture, architecture and book design. There was also an overlap with the difficult-to-grasp school of art known as Symbolism. But yes, the number of redheaded femme fatales was still conspicuously large...

Five stars for the book, but I must admit that I don't quite like the art itself. Too many strange, bright colors! And too few wombats, LOL.