Marilyn BauerWriter
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith
Art · Criticism

Under Beauty

Victorian paintings with the emotional voltage of the Summer of Love.
By Marilyn Bauer · The Cincinnati Enquirer · Selected excerpts
Dante Gabriel Rossetti · Lady Lilith · Delaware Art Museum
The Pre-Raphaelites

The art of the 19th-century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is the art of 1960s concert posters. Album covers and head shop paraphernalia. It is filled with the ideal forms of iconic women, coils of voluptuous hair winding over snow-white shoulders amid landscapes filled with night-creepers and hummingbirds.

The landscapes are a fantasy, too — thick with flowers just past their prime, ominous outcroppings and the silvery shudder of water.

It is not surprising that these images were co-opted during the Summer of Love. They are saturated with emotion, layered with symbolism and rich with sensuous color.

Ford Madox Brown, Romeo and Juliet
The exhibition

Free love and beauty,
Victorian style.

The Cincinnati Art Museum mounted Waking Dreams: Experience the Enchantment, placing the sumptuous paintings in context with drawings, decorative arts, literature and jewelry.

“These are gorgeous paintings,” says Betsy Wieseman, the museum’s curator of European painting and sculpture. “They are absolutely stunning things, and you get to see them surrounded by the things they would have been surrounded by when they were produced.”

The gallery installation was only part of the show. The museum also created a virtual journey around Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the women he loved — a magical mystery tour that challenged visitors to discover whom Rossetti loved best.

Rebellion before romance

But no such incentive is necessary for anyone aware of the rebellious Victorian movement that flowered in London in the mid-19th century. It was a close-knit group of multitalented people who intermarried, worked for and with one another, and inspired one another to ever more ecstatic heights.

“They were intensely interested in a very simple basic direct art that in a way was instinctual,” says Wieseman. “They looked to the simpler art and craft of the Middle Ages for inspiration. A lot of it looked primitive and unschooled, but the intent was really against the formulaic stuff that was being taught at the academy.”

At the Royal Academy of Arts, artists were being taught a watered-down version of the techniques of the great Renaissance painter, Raphael.

“It was a rebellion against the strict academic art,” says Wieseman. “Raphael came up with a very clear canon of beauty. The Pre-Raphaelite painters didn’t have a problem with Raphael but with the generation upon generation of artists and the art academy who were not looking at Raphael but looking and teaching from somebody who looked at somebody who looked at somebody who looked at Raphael.”

The art looks backward in order to move forward.

By the 1800s, a watered-down, placid aesthetic was being taught in the schools, where artists were required to draw bodies from plaster casts and copy paintings from prints.

Rossetti and others, including the influential art critic John Ruskin, urged their compatriots to go out into the world and study nature. To feel something, see it, breathe it, live it and then — with emotion and all the senses — transfer the experience to the canvas.

“If you came up with something primitive, that was OK because you were not painting from convention,” Wieseman says.

The women
inside the myth

Rossetti’s search for transcendent beauty leads into the complicated human center of the story: wives, lovers, models and artists moving through the same charged world.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Proserpine, modeled by Jane Morris
Dante Gabriel Rossetti · Proserpine · modeled by Jane Morris

Rossetti stands out not only as a fervent practitioner of the new art, but for the women with whom he was involved, many of them artists in their own right.

“He was more of a voluptuary than the average bear,” explains Wieseman. “On a higher level, he was always searching for the perfect, feminine beauty and hoping to possess it either in his paintings or in his home.”

Was it the frail Lizzie Siddal, his wife and an artist herself? Was it the model Fanny Cornforth, a lifelong friend whom he encountered in a pleasure garden? Or was it Jane Morris, wife of friend and business partner William Morris?

This search for transcendent beauty — and the depiction of strong, independent, almost warrior-like women — has an interesting parallel in the rise of feminism in the ’60s and ’70s.

“There was a lot to admire there and reflect on,” says Wieseman. “Within the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, there was a lot more equality for women. They were extremely talented painters and craftspersons, textile workers, potters and jewelry-makers.”

But Rossetti and the brotherhood sought to express more than feminine beauty. Their paintings are layered with symbols and filled with tragic women drawn from literature: the Romantic poets, including Byron and Keats; Arthurian legend; and Shakespeare.

“The paintings hit you in multiple senses — the passion of the literature, the symbols — the whole effect. You can almost smell the perfume.”

To be sure. This is a powerful, evocative exhibition of paintings self-consciously dramatic and powerful that should be savored again and again.

← Back to Work