ART HISTORY: Brian Fallonreviews Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives of the Pre-RaphaelitesBy Franny Moyle John Murray, 340pp. £20
A GENERATION AGO, the Pre-Raphaelites were more or less under critical ban, like most Victorian art and a great deal of Victorian literature as well. Various pundits even dismissed them as one of the nadirs of English painting – and this at a time when the likes of Graham Sutherland and Matthew Smith were being lauded as major figures of Modernism. All that is changed now, of course; “Victorian” is no longer an abusive word, and events such as the recent Millais exhibition in London are treated with critical respect and – what is equally important – public understanding.
No doubt these highly disparate artists produced some period horrors, with Holman Hunt one of the leading offenders, but collectively they added a major chapter to British painting. The Pre-Raphaelites were more than a talented school, they represented a major revolution in taste, and their influence – good and bad – lasted for almost three generations. Though they become almost synonymous in some eyes with preciosity and twilight escapism, their leading figures were in fact robust, pragmatic men, well able to cope with both mass philistinism and the entrenched hostility of older painters such as Frith. (Ford Madox Ford, who knew most of them in his youth through his art-critic father, wrote in retrospect that they looked and sounded like sea-captains.) Burne-Jones might seem an exception, yet his etiolated appearance concealed a strong will, disciplined work habits and the ability to survive under pressure and stress.
DG Rossetti, Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, William Morris and Burne-Jones himself were all remarkable men, and so was the critic and intellectual prophet who supported them, John Ruskin. What is unusual, however, is that the women they chose (or who chose them?) were also people of exceptional character and individuality. Even in their lifetimes, personal legends were created which continue to fascinate biographers in a way that Carlyle’s married life, for instance, no longer does. So Franny Moyle is covering, for the most part, well-trampled ground, but she has new material to add to the chronicle and also her own interpretation of what are often complex and even enigmatic happenings.
Rossetti’s on-off-on relationship with Lizzie Siddall is familiar territory and it is doubtful if, at this stage, much more can be said about it. She was a London shop-worker whom he chose as a model, fell in love with and then (seemingly) tired of, but eventually married when her health began to fail. Tall and red-haired, she virtually created the Pre-Raphaelite stereotype of female beauty, but her character remains nebulous and though she showed promise as a painter and poet, she died too soon to fulfil it.
Eventually she took an overdose of laudanum, apparently suffering from what we would call post-natal depression after the birth of a stillborn child. The inquest chose to call it death by misadventure, and Rossetti himself was absolved of all blame, but for the rest of his life he was a haunted man. He consoled himself with other women, notably Fanny Cornforth, a coarse and earthy, but handsome, woman of the streets whom he shared with his artist-friend George Price Boyce.
Holman Hunt, like others of the group, was attracted to working-class girls and thought he had found his fulfilment in Annie Miller, a robust but strikingly beautiful vulgarian whom he groomed for marriage and attempted to educate up to the required standards. Hunt then departed on a painting pilgrimage to the Holy Land (where he painted The Scapegoat, his masterpiece) but soon discovered that his fiancée had been amusing herself in his absence with various of his friends – including Rossetti, who enjoyed stealing other men’s mistresses.
Much stress, mutual reproach and tough negotiation followed, until Hunt finally bought off Annie for a sizeable sum when she threatened to sell or divulge his letters. Annie later married a military man, while Hunt made an altogether more eligible match with Edith Waugh, who, however, soon died in childbirth. Hunt then married her sister, in the face of a good deal of moral disapproval – Victorian codes did not allow a man to marry his sister-in-law, and the union had to be solemnised abroad.
Millais, who had been Hunt’s almost inseparable friend and colleague, was also involved in a kind of semi-scandal – in fact, one of the most famous and contentious of mid-Victorian times. Ruskin, his influential supporter and virtual patron, had married a much younger woman, the Scottish beauty and socialite Euphemia (Effie) Gray, though for reasons which are still obscure he failed to consummate their union. On a painting trip to Scotland, during which Millais was supposed to paint Ruskin’s portrait, he and Effie fell in love, but divorce was out of the question, nor did they become lovers.
In the end, Effie’s family, realising at last the state of affairs, sued for dissolution of the non-marriage and she become a free woman – though Millais had to keep a decorous distance from her until she could become his legal and blameless bride . Her reputation still suffered, however; Queen Victoria refused to receive her at court until Millais, dying of cancer and by now world-famous, made a death-bed appeal to the Queen. Victoria relented, but Effie herself died shortly afterwards.
WILLIAM MORRIS, unlike Hunt, did marry a working-class girl – Jane Burden, the daughter of a stable-worker; but in spite of two daughters the marriage was not happy and Rossetti, the eternal charmer and seducer, became her lover. For a time they limped along uneasily as a threesome, but apparently Morris then opted out of the relationship, while Rossetti was fast becoming a virtual drug-addict (chloral, washed down by whiskey) with paranoid symptoms. Janey, understandably, began to back away from her self-immolating lover. Yet in spite of failing powers as an artist, Rossetti produced some hypnotic paintings of her, and plainly she was an inspiring model –very tall, queenly, silent, with a tight mass of black hair.
Burne-Jones, Morris’s closest friend and collaborator, similarly found his femme fatale in the beautiful and tempestuous Greek, Maria Zambaco, who came close to breaking up his hitherto happy married life with Georgiana Macdonald. Somehow he and Georgie – a woman of sterling character and intelligence – managed to stay together, but things were never the same again and she found solace in Socialism and her platonic friendship with Morris, a fellow-reformist.
In the end, Georgie survived both men by many years, becoming her husband’s very capable biographer.
Most of this has been told before, of course, but it all bears retelling and Franny Moyle fleshes it out further with some new material and shrewd surmises. It is an involved chronicle, however, and at times she seems almost baffled by the density of her subject and the complex interaction of a highly gifted, often wayward group of people who were also birthmarked for individuality. It is possible to regard the Pre- Raphaelites, male and female alike, as "emancipated" figures ahead of their epoch, but amorous relationships have always been common among artists, even in Victorian times – videthe private lives of Turner, Mulready, Danby etc.
The book is well illustrated and researched, as well as crisply written, but I doubt very much if it is the last word, or words, on a specific milieu of English life and art which remains unique of its kind.
Brian Fallon was art critic of The Irish Timesfor 35 years. He is the author of numerous books on art, literature and culture