Collecting the Pre-Raphaelites

The Anglo-American Enchantment

Margaretta Frederick Watson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429855979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1997, and written by leading scholars of the day, these fifteen essays examine aspects of the reception and collecting of Pre-Raphaelite Art, the social and cultural context in which the work was favoured and acquired. Two major collections provide the focus for the investigation: that of the Birmingham city Museums and Art Gallery in the United Kingdom, and that of the American Samuel Bancroft Jr, now part of the Delaware Art Museum. The study of these two collections both formed in the late 1890', places Pre-Raphaelite Art at nexus of contemporary cultural issues that touched the lives of both the city council, intent on establishing a public gallery of national importance, and a wealthy American businessman, indulging a private passion for the work of these artists. The contributors approach the issue in a variety of ways, These include the study of the ambitions and self-perception of collectors of the period, an analysis of the impact of John Ruskin's campaign to establish Pre-Raphaelite painting as the 'Art of England', and its impact on notions of civic and national identity; the examination of individual painting in relation to such issues as the portrayal of women, the nude and of religious subjects; and the study of the Victorian preoccupation with Renaissance Italy and the attempt by Ruskin, Charles Fairfax Murray, advisor to the two collections, and the Grosvenor Gallery, to proclaim the Pre-Raphaelite artists as the true inheritors of the 'genius' of Renaissance Italian artists.These essays were first presented at a symposium held at the Delaware Art Museum during the exhibition there of the paintings of Birmingham City Museums and Art Gallery.

1
Introduction 'Crossing the Big Pond': the Anglo-American appeal of Pre-Raphaelitism

Margaretta Frederick Watson

The essays presented here formed the core of a symposium entitled 'Ideas and Images: the Pre-Raphaelites', which took place at the Delaware Art Museum in September 1995. The conference was held to commemorate the historic confluence of two great collections of Pre-Raphaelite art - the Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft, Jr. and Related Pre-Raphaelite Collections of the Delaware Art Museum,¹ and that of the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery as represented by the touring exhibition of highlights 'Visions of Love and Life: Pre-Raphaelite Art from the Birmingham Collection, England'.² The correlations between these two collections - the paintings, the patrons and the rationale behind their formation (despite geographic distance and different nationalities) - exemplify what John Ruskin referred to so wonderfully as 'the pre-Raphaelitism common to us all'.³ Ruskin's words highlight that remarkable underlying factor or group of factors inherent in the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their followers which was equally attractive to citizens on both sides of the Atlantic.

Both collections were formed largely by private individuals, despite the group effort, as Stephen Wildman shows, inherent in the genesis of that of Birmingham. In addition, both were assembled after Pre-Raphaelite art had moved from avant-garde to broad public acceptance. This lag in appreciation bears looking into - particularly in the case of Birmingham, given the progressive collecting habits of the citizens in other British industrial cities of the period,⁴ in particular Liverpool⁵ and Newcastle.⁶

Birmingham's earliest acquisition of a 'true' Pre-Raphaelite painting for its public collection was in 1883, thirty-four years after a painting of this school had first been exhibited in the city.⁷ Even taking into account the pressing social needs that quite necessarily took precedence over the use of public funds for the formation of an art collection, this delay is somewhat unusual.⁸ However, as Stephen Wildman suggests, the increasing number of purchases and gifts of Pre-Raphaelite art throughout the 1890s and into the twentieth century may well have reflected a nationalist pride for what had become, primarily through John Ruskin's promotion, the true 'Art of England'.⁹

While Birmingham's holdings were assembled collectively by the Corporation of the City, the Delaware Art Museum's Pre-Raphaelite collection, although formed at roughly the same time, was the result of the singular vision of one individual - Samuel Bancroft. As Rowland Elzea explains, Bancroft had no thought of civic augmentation in the formation of his collection, despite his own substantial public endeavours.¹⁰ This group of paintings consequently represents a very personal statement, one which was originally intended only for private viewing and personal pleasure.

Samuel Bancroft, whose English business connections and family heritage were perhaps the basis for a clearly anglophile cultural bias, viewed his first Pre-Raphaelite painting in 1880 with a 'shock of delight'. Beginning hesitatingly nearly a decade later with the purchase of Rossetti's Water Willow, (see Figure 3.2),¹¹ he continued to build his collection until the last years of his life.

Bancroft's sympathy for Pre-Raphaelite art is unique given the guarded reception of these paintings in America in the movement's early years. American knowledge and appreciation of the work of these artists were founded primarily on the writings of John Ruskin, and in particular on his Modem Painters, first published in the United States in 1847.¹² The earliest examples of Pre-Raphaelite art available to the American public were those included in the 1857-8 touring exhibition of British art which had venues in New York, Philadelphia and Boston. William Michael Rossetti believed that Americans might be receptive to Pre-Raphaelite art. In 1857 he wrote, 'The taste for Art is growing in America, as it must grow with advancing wealth, population, and resources. Americans are already in Europe keen competitors at any sale of objects of virtu, or of antiquarian interest ..,'¹³ However, it was not until the mid-i870s and the 1880s that collectors like Charles Eliot Norton¹⁴ and Samuel Bancroft began to purchase these works. Americans, like the citizens of Birmingham, came late to their appreciation of the art of the PRB.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating correlations between the two collections is represented in the person of Charles Fairfax Murray. Murray served as adviser to Samuel Bancroft in the formation of his collection from around 1892 onwards, but his tastes are also clearly represented in Birmingham's holdings through his personal gifts and, most importantly, the museum's acquisition of his collection of over 800 Pre-Raphaelite drawings between 1903 and 1906.¹⁵ Julie Codell's discussion of Murray's life as a self-styled artist, copyist, dealer, collector and promoter of Pre-Raphaelite and early Italian painting is thus particularly relevant to the focus of this volume.

Murray played a crucial role as supplier of copies and photographs of Italian Old Masters to the Pre-Raphaelite artists. This was necessary due to the limited opportunities for members of the PRB to view actual works of 'pre-Raphaelite' art. Gail Weinberg investigates the possibilities available to Rossetti and others while tracing the gradual change in 'approved' Old Masters from artists of the High Renaissance and Baroque periods to those of the early Renaissance in nineteenth-century England.

One opportunity for the young Pre-Raphaelite artists to view early Italian art was in the homes of two of their most supportive patrons, William Graham and Frederick Leyland. Both formed consummate collections of Italian art. Bancroft developed similar tastes, as is evident in his purchase of several major pieces, including Rossetti's Lady Lilith (see Figure 11.1), from the Leyland sale of 1892. Although there is no record of Bancroft expressing a direct interest in early Italian art, the Botticellian aspects of Lady Lilith, a painting which had been a benchmark of Leyland's collection when displayed in his home at 52 Prince's Gate, London, suggests a shared partiality for the Italian artist's style.

In the case of Birmingham, in which the object was to form a civic collection of 'national' art, the Old Master aspect of the Pre-Raphaelite style may reveal a subliminal desire to re-create in a nineteenth-century English city a semblance of the past nobility of the great Italian Renaissance city states.¹⁶

One of the first venues in which early Italian art was made available to the public at large, Pre-Raphaelites included, was the British Institution. Founded in 1805, this body believed that in order to improve the current state of British art, living artists must have the opportunity to view Old Masters. When the British Institution folded in 1867, several other institutions took up the slack and continued exhibiting Old Masters, and these included the Grosvenor Gallery,¹⁷ which first opened its doors in 1877. Colleen Denney discusses this alternative art exhibition space in terms of its annual contemporary art displays, in which the works of the second-generation Pre-Raphaelites were particularly prominent. The Grosvenor Gallery, like the two collections highlighted here, was a product of private enterprise, the vision of Sir Coutts Lindsay. The Grosvenor is particularly relevant within the confines of this group of essays for its role in sanctioning the Pre-Raphaelite movement and, in fact, going so far as to bestow upon this movement an aura of idolatry.

Denney's explanation of the 'new religion' associated with the second-generation Pre-Raphaelites who exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery highlights its direct impact on the formation of the Birmingham and Delaware collections. Much like Murray, the Grosvenor exhibitions acted as a public relations agent, pushing the work of Burne-Jones and others into the spotlight and raising their status in the public eye. The decision by the governing body of Birmingham to create a collection so rich in the art of this group of artists, as well as Samuel Bancroft's similarly intensive focus, exemplifies the widespread acceptance of the Pre-Raphaelites during the second half of the nineteenth century - a state of affairs which occurred in large part as a result of the 'worship' bestowed upon these artists when their work was exhibited at the Grosvenor. In fact, given the citizenry of Birmingham's largely suspicious attitude towards formalized religion, their appreciation of such 'non-denominational sermonfs] in paint' (Wildman) as Burne-Jones's Star of Bethlehem is understandable.

Although a member of the disciplined Quaker community in Wilmington, Bancroft, too, can be described as decidedly liberal in his religious views. (Elzea describes the 'independence of mind' that characterized Bancroft's interest in literature, poetry and art and set him apart from local Quakers.) Perhaps he, too, became a worshipper of what Quentin Bell refers to in the work of Burne-Jones and Rossetti as an 'atheological religion' which focused on female beauty.¹⁸ This would explain his preference for the iconic female figures of Rossetti's late work, and the significant absence of the work of the religious proselytizer Holman Hunt.

This worship of female beauty is confronted by Alison Smith in her essay on the nude in Pre-Raphaelite art. Guided perhaps by the moral emphasis of John Ruskin's championing of their art, the original members of the PRB did not take up the nude as a subject until several years after the movement's inception, although, as in the case of Rossetti's risque Venus Verticordia (1864-8, Russell-Cotes Art Gallery, Bournemouth), it provoked Ruskin's disapproval.¹⁹ Despite this, the morality associated with early Pre-Raphaelitism was quickly replaced by a more fervent evaluation of the aesthetic beauty perceived in depictions of the female body. In many ways, the use of the nude by second-generation Pre-Raphaelites, such as Burne-Jones, can be seen as part of the quest for a 'High Art' for England. Lynda Nead explains the role of the nude in the evocation of 'high culture,' which

is seen to confer a sacred identity on the objects/situations within its domain, precisely through its repudiation of the body and its pleasures . . . the female nude is not simply one cultural type among many others of equal significance; rather, it is a paradigm of the transforming effects of legitimate high culture . . .²⁰

Viewed in this light, Birmingham's ownership of several nude paintings, including Burne-Jones's Pygmalion and the Image (see Figure 6.1),²¹ is understandable. In creating an art gallery worthy of their city and nation, the inclusion of such examples of British art would have been nothing short of a requirement.²²

In America, too, the quest for cultural respectability w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• List of Figures
• 1 Introduction 'Crossing the Big Pond': the Anglo-American appeal of Pre-Raphaelitism
• 2 Pre-Raphaelitism and the Civic Gospel: Burne-Jones and Ruskin in Birmingham
• 3 Samuel Bancroft: Pre-Raphaelite collector
• 4 Charles Fairfax Murray and the Pre-Raphaelite 'Academy': writing and forging the artistic field
• 5 'Looking backward': opportunities for the Pre-Raphaelites to see 'pre-Raphaelite' art
• 6 Acts of worship at the Temple of Art: the Grosvenor Gallery and the second-generation Pre-Raphaelites
• 7 The Pre-Raphaelite nude
• 8 The Pre-Raphaelite movement and nineteenth-century ladies' dress: a study in Victorian views of the female body
• 9 Pre-Raphaelite women collectors and the female gaze
• 10 Female savants and the erotics of knowledge in Pre-Raphaelite art
• 11 Pre-Raphaelite portraiture: a strangely disordered vision
• 12 The Pre-Raphaelites, St George and the construction of masculinity
• 13 Epitaph in Avalon: Edward Burne-Jones's last picture
• 14 A conflict of intentions: Tennyson versus Pre-Raphaelite illustrators
• 15 Suburban prospects: vision and possession in Ford Madox Brown's An English Autumn Afternoon
• 16 The 'Englishness' of Pre-Raphaelite painting: a critical review
• Selected Bibliography
• Index