Pre-Raphelite Networks
In this session, members of the Graduate Network and Professionals Network of the Pre-Raphaelite Society come together to share research on artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, their associates and successors, and the networks that they formed. The global reach of the Pre-Raphaelites will be examined in papers on Catalan Modernisme, the ‘Roma Preraffaellita’ and the Scottish artist Noel Paton; and the Villa Nuti, near Florence, is identified as a site of transnational Pre-Raphaelite significance. The way that Jane Morris reinforced her friendship networks by creating and gifting keepsake books is explored, as well as the lampooning of Pre-Raphaelite networks in Punch magazine. The involvement of John William Waterhouse in a secret Occult society – The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – will be revealed. Additionally, founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Podcast will discuss how innovative methods, such as social media, short-form online content and streaming services, can be employed in the twenty-first century to extend Pre-Raphaelite networks to new and ever-increasing audiences.
Convenors:
Serena Trowbridge, Birmingham City University and The Pre-Raphaelite Society
Emily Learmont, University of Edinburgh and The Pre-Raphaelite Society
Speakers:
Cecilia Rose, University of Exeter
Occult Networks: John William Waterhouse and The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
With no letters or diaries surviving, John William Waterhouse remains one of the most elusive figures in Pre-Raphaelitism, with very little known about his personal life and artistic influences. Critics such as Elizabeth Prettejohn and Peter Trippi have suggested that he wished elements of his life to remain hidden due to a private preoccupation with the somewhat controversial pursuit of Occultism. Prompted by this suggestion, I have undertaken extensive archival research to explore the possibility that he may have been a member of a secret Occult society, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The evidence is fairly compelling: his geographical proximity to several other members, the fact that his brother-in-law was a member and conferred with him on the subject, and the specific golden dawn emblems hidden in works such as The Magic Circle (1886) and Consulting the Oracle (1884), all point to at least a peripheral involvement in the group.
Formed in 1888 and largely based in London, the society required a vow of secrecy, held meetings on practising magic (as well as related activities such as tarot reading and seances), and admitted men and women on equal terms. It became associated with the Suffrage Movement, due to its progressive outlook on gender, and attracted a host of unconventional artistic figures, including the poet W. B. Yeats, actress Florence Farr, Lady Jane Wilde, Aleister Crowley and illustrator Pamela Colman Smith. There is a possibility that other Pre-Raphaelite artists, such as Evelyn De Morgan (who had a keen interest in Spiritualism and Mediumship), were also involved in the Order – but this is yet to be fully explored.
Suzanne Fagence Cooper, University of York
‘Fayre soul, good frend’: Jane Burden Morris and her keepsake books
In the 1880s and 90s, Jane Morris made and decorated at least 4 small keepsake books. These manuscript collections were given to friends, sometimes as Christmas gifts, and contained extracts of poems and proverbs, ranging from Chaucer to Newman. There are phrases in medieval French and in Greek, alongside selections from contemporary poets including Amy Levy and Andrew Lang. They show the breadth of her reading as well as Jane Morris’s delight in works by friends, and writers in her wider circle. She frequently quotes Swinburne and includes verses by both Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
A close reading of these manuscripts is enlightening because it helps us to establish how new texts were being read and incorporated into personal collections. It also allows us to recover the networks of friendship that were being celebrated or reinforced when Jane Morris gave away these small, carefully designed books. They were part of her construction of creative conversations at home and on her travels.
These little books also reveal Jane Morris’s own idiosyncratic pattern-making. Her calligraphic decorations do not resemble the work of her husband William, or her daughter May. They demonstrate her independence, in her choice of reading and in her approach to design. And they may encourage us to question the fuller meaning, to Jane and to her friends, of phrases like ‘kindness, nobler ever than revenge’ or ‘memor et fidelis’. These intensely personal productions can open up intriguing connections between text/image, poet/reader and artist/friend.
Melissa Berry, University of Victoria
Catalan Modernisme and the Pre-Raphaelite Connection
Alexandre de Riquer (1856-1920) was a central figure of Catalan Modernism, a movement dedicated to the revitalization of the region’s identity, as an artist as well as a poet and collector. An influential and cosmopolitan figure, Riquer spent two months in London in late spring of 1894. About this trip he would later state:
…the Modern Masters stood before me as strong as ever, and with all their profound knowledge of their art —Burne-Jones, Millais, Moore, and, above all to me, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, blazing like a sunflower of poetry, reflecting and reproducing absolute beauty.[1]
His admiration for William Morris and Aubrey Beardsley were also mentioned, linking him to the Arts and Crafts Movement and, while that is evidenced in his work, it was most clearly the work of the Pre-Raphaelites that he was eager to import and share with colleagues in Spain.
Encountering the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, such are Burne-Jones and Rossetti, confirmed for Riquer his proclivity toward a renewed medievalism as well as decorative aspects within his art. His interest in expanding his own practice also grew, now with a focus on poster art alongside his bookplates and illustrations that sometimes embellished his own writings. As a prominent early advocate of Catalan Modernism, Riquer’s admiration for and integration of the Pre-Raphaelites’ work presents a heretofore neglected translocal connection while reiterating the necessity of hybrid approaches to national identity.
Eduardo De Maio, University of York
Nino Costa and the “Roma Preraffaellita”: Forging cultural internationalism in Rome at the fin de siècle
In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, namely the decades following the unification of Italy, the imperative of establishing Rome as the cultural epicentre of the new state became urgent. However, Rome lacked a cohesive cultural identity that could unify the artistic regionalities of the Italian peninsula and could compete internationally with other European cultural centres, such as Paris or London. In this discouraging context, the painter Giovanni ‘Nino’ Costa emerged as an instrumental figure in fostering cultural cosmopolitanism by circulating British artistic ideals within the Roman art scene, making Rome a key anglophile and international cultural centre in Italy. Costa’s connections with prominent figures in the local Anglo-American milieu, including the Pre-Raphaelite follower and painter, Marie Spartali Stillman, contributed to the establishment of the international cultural circle In Arte Libertas. This not only provided a valuable opportunity for Italian artists to admire British Pre-Raphaelite and international art in original for the first time, but also stimulated the Roman artistic context towards cultural international aspirations. This paper examines the role of Nino Costa in establishing a unique anglophile and Pre-Raphaelite inspired tendency within the Roman art scene in the late nineteenth century, that art historians would later identify as ‘Roma Preraffaellita’, which embodied the urgency of cultural internationalism in the city as well as in Italy at the turn of the twentieth century. This study will reveal how Costa’s cosmopolitan endeavours positioned Rome as a receptive epicentre for Pre-Raphaelitism, marking a transformative chapter in Italian fin-de-siècle art and culture.
Anne Anderson, Independent
‘Mr Punch’ and the Pre-Raphaelites
F. C. Burnand, editor of Punch from 1880, apparently had little love for either the Pre-Raphaelites or the Aesthetes. His farce The Colonel (February 1881), which preceded Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, took a swipe at both with the duplicitous Lambert Streyke, an apostle of the ‘ultra pre-Raphaelite, mock hysteric, super-aesthetic school of art’ and his nephew Basil Giorgione, a chemist’s assistant turned Pre-Raphaelite painter. Basil had in fact been invented by Punch cartoonist George du Maurier in Affiliating an Aesthete (June 1880). Accordingto Walter Hamilton, it was audacious to call The Colonel an original piece as it relied heavily on the sayings and doings of the ‘intense’ characters created du Maurier. While his ‘Mutual Admiration Society’, featuring Mrs Cimabue Brown, Maudle and Postlethwaite is well known, his campaign against the Pre-Raphaelites began with A Legend of Camelot (1866), which parodies the styles of Rossetti and Hunt. The ‘Rise and Fall of the Jack Spratts: A Tale of Modern Art and Fashion’, serialised September-October 1878, followed. Both series were accompanied by verses, which are often overlooked in favour of the images. Du Maurier appears to have wearied of mocking the Aesthetes after 1882. However, Harry Furness took up the challenge in his ‘Grosvenor Gallery Gems.’ Although Hamilton observed that nobody had heard of the aesthetes until they were made the target of ‘our sneering satirists’, the full impact of Punch’s Campaign against the Cult of Beauty has yet to be assessed.
Edith Charlesworth, University of Cambridge
From Barnsley to Bellosguardo: A Pre-Raphaelite Confluence of Friends, Family and Faith
In December 1883, Evelyn Pickering De Morgan created her organ panels at All Saints in Cawthorne near Barnsley, the last element of the church’s remodelling by her uncle, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, and George Frederick Bodley. De Morgan and Bodley were both regular visitors to the Villa Nuti in Bellosguardo outside Florence, purchased by Stanhope in 1873 and his permanent home from 1880. Neither of these locations have previously been studied in detail, yet here they are uncovered as key examples of transnational, intergenerational Pre-Raphaelite networks. Villa Nuti provided the initial point of contact between De Morgan and Edward Burne-Jones, where the latter retreated into his ‘frightened’ shell at the sight of such a ‘plain lady’. The house gave Stanhope’s niece a base from which to explore Renaissance collections and appeared in paintings including her ‘Bells of San Vito’ of 1891. Additionally, the villa provided the backdrop for future collaborations between Stanhope and Bodley, and even inspired the latter to poetry. This paper will use the equally neglected All Saints Church to illustrate the networks forged at Villa Nuti. It was within All Saints that Stanhope’s own pulpit panels dialogised with Burne-Jones’ stained-glass memorial to Stanhope’s daughter who died in Florence, which in turn occupied the same space as De Morgan’s organ panels, referencing Botticelli’s Portrait of a Youth with a Medal. Both All Saints and Villa Nuti are locations of vital importance for the communication of second-generation Pre-Raphaelite artists and deserved to be studied in detail.
Joanna Meacock, Glasgow Life Museums
‘A freckled whelp’: Noel Paton’s Caliban, Scottish Identity and Enslavement
This paper will focus on Scottish Pre-Raphaelite Noel Paton’s Caliban (1867-68), a fascinating painting that marks the artist’s entrance into the establishment, his knighthood and appointment as Her Majesty’s Limner, but also the last artwork that Paton was to exhibit at the Royal Academy in London. It is complex and contradictory, a painting tied up with violence, colonialism and Paton’s own complicated views on enslavement and racial prejudice.
Caliban from Shakespeare’s Tempest is a multifaceted character, enslaved, exploited, capable of violence, treated as sub-human, his island colonised. Paton’s representation of him departs markedly from contemporary depictions based on colonial racist ideologies – German scholar Georg Gottfried Gervinus’ noted in his 4-volumed Shakespeare (1849-50, trans. English 1863), that Caliban ‘is a near-anagram of Cannibal’. However, Paton does not portray Caliban as savage in his violence, but in a moment of calm and wonder, listening to Ariel’s music on a Scottish beach. In a depiction full of sympathy, Paton, who was fondly referred to by photographer D. O. Hill as ‘Noll of the auburn poll’, gives Caliban red hair, linking him with other maligned characters like Shylock but also his own Celtic roots. Paton knew what it was to be other and outsider, his studies at the Royal Academy Schools in 1843, although bringing him in touch with John Everett Millais, cut short, possibly as a result of bigotry experienced as a red-haired Scot with a regional accent in London. Using a rounded arch format favoured by the Pre-Raphaelites and suggestive of an altarpiece, Caliban is elevated. This paper will consider Paton’s unique portrayal of Caliban in the context of Victorian racism and his own complex attitudes towards what it means to be ‘civilised’.
Karl Merrick and Alex Round, Birmingham City University
Establishing Pre-Raphaelite Networks for the Twenty-First Century
Collaboratively responding to the exciting, challenging and innovative ways in which both research and art was produced and consumed allowed The Pre-Raphaelites to pioneer radical changes in Victorian art culture. Similarly, those of us who study, work with or draw inspiration from the Pre-Raphaelites today face both modern challenges and exciting opportunities. The rise of social media, streaming services and short-form content needed a response from The Pre-Raphaelite Society to maintain its potency and entice a new generation scholars and enthusiasts.
In this talk, we shall discuss the benefits of a collaborative approach to establishing contemporary networks of Pre-Raphaelite enthusiasts. Drawing on our experience establishing The Pre-Raphaelite Podcast, we will demonstrate how international and cross-disciplinary relationships can be created, sustained and grown. The Pre-Raphaelite Podcast filled a vacuum between a popular enthusiasm for the art and rigorous academic study which encapsulated perhaps the bulk of consumers of Pre-Raphaelitism.
While The Pre-Raphaelite Podcast remains a practical and vocational endeavour, it is appropriate to talk about it in terms of the digital humanities and we can retrospectively theorise around the project. Responding to the limitations of conferences, particularly post-pandemic, the Podcast team were able to mobilise new technological opportunities for digital networking. Furthermore, we firmly believe that we have created an accessible, ever-expanding digital archive of contemporary Pre-Raphaelitism that previously would have been impossible. We have been able to draw from the experience of scholars, historians, museum professionals, curators, artists, craftspeople, musicians, authors, poets and photographers in a way that echoes the original inter-disciplinary, multi-media phenomenon of Pre-Raphaelitism. The output is a sizable snapshot into the Pre-Raphaelite landscape of the early twenty-first century.