Oil Painting - The Blind Girl - Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery Information Centre Oil Painting - The Blind Girl ï¿½ Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery There are no additional images for this object. Basic Information John Everett Millais - View biography for John Everett Millais Notes The distant background of this painting shows the village of Winchelsea in Sussex, painted in the autumn of 1854. The two girls in the foreground and the middle ground were added later in Perth in 1855. The models were Matilda Proudfoot as the blind girl and Isabella Nichol as her younger sister. Millais had first used his wife Effie but then replaced her with Matilda. The scene deals with the contemporary social problem of vagrancy, focusing on the predicament of children and the disabled. Tate has a pencil drawing of the younger girl in a standing position. Presented by the Rt Hon William Kendrick, 1892.

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery launches pixel perfect Pre-Raphaelite site | Culture24 Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery launches pixel perfect Pre-Raphaelite site By Culture24 Staff | 26 June 2009 Tags: News Archived article (Above) Zooming in on the The Blind Girl, John Everett Millais. Picture courtesy Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has launched a cutting-edge online resource for studying the art of the Pre-Raphaelites, offering access to 2,000 fine and decorative pieces from their unrivalled collection. The site uses Microsoft Silverlight technology, which has a Deep Zoom function allowing the viewer to see the intense colours, brush strokes and pencil etchings in high quality detail. Visitors can now scrutinise the detail, for example, in John Everett Millais' Blind Girl (1856), including a somewhat inconspicuous note under the lady's shawl reading "Pity the Blind". Viewed on a computer screen, the addition takes centre stage. The Blind Girl, John Everett Millais.

Picture courtesy Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Funded with the help of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the project was led by Birmningham City Council, who hope the site will attract Pre-Raphaelite fans new and old. "This is about bringing Birmingham's world class collection of Pre-Raphaelite art to a world-wide audience using the latest digital technology," said Councillor Martin Mullaney, Cabinet Member for Leisure, Sport and Culture. "It should increase the number of virtual visits to the Museum and Art Gallery and can only enhance the city's reputation internationally as a centre for culture." Last of England, Ford Maddox Brown. Picture courtesy Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Having taken almost two years of cataloguing and research to develop the site, the team at BMAG took a year to photograph all the paintings from the collection. It features works from the founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Ford Maddox Brown and the Birmingham-born Edward Burne-Jones.

Works from the Second Phase of the movement also feature, with intricate pieces from the Dalziel Brothers, Joseph Swain, John Ruskin, William Morris and a number of women artists including Rosa Brett, Kate Bunce and Eleanor Fortesque-Brickdale. Medea, Frederick Sandys. Picture courtesy Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery "The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource is a major step forward in bringing Victorian art into the digital age," said Professor Stephen Wildman, Director of the Ruskin Library and Research Centre, Lancaster University. "The images and information now available online will be of great use to scholars, while the teaching resources should fire the imagination and interest of schools everywhere, bringing the unsurpassed Birmingham collection the worldwide attention it deserves." Further facilities are available to registered users, including a select and save function for favourite images, grouping images together and sharing collections with other users. For more information or to browse the collection visit Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource website . All tags Victorian art, the sentimental poor – and Cameron's Britain | Jonathan Jones | Art and design | The Guardian Jonathan Jones on art Victorian art, the sentimental poor – and Cameron's Britain Want to see what Coalition Britain will turn into?

Take a long hard look at John Everett Millais's The Blind Girl Jonathan Jones on art Victorian art, the sentimental poor – and Cameron's Britain Want to see what Coalition Britain will turn into? Take a long hard look at John Everett Millais's The Blind Girl Tuesday 26 October 2010 10.33 EDT First published on Tuesday 26 October 2010 10.33 EDT Share on Messenger Close It might help us picture the Britain that is being made if we compare two paintings – one a Victorian favourite, the other dating from the very dawn of the 20th century. The Blind Girl (1856) by John Everett Millais is a work of art with a social conscience, or at least social sentiment. It portrays two children in rags, on the outskirts of a prosperous village: cast out and unprovided-for, the blind girl and her sister wander the British countryside, playing music for pennies. But as she sits exhausted on the ground, the blind girl casts her face upward and heaven's light shines on her. Contrast this pathetic scene with Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo's 1901 painting The Fourth Estate .

Not a painting of journalists – the fourth estate in this painting is the working class. The organised working class. United and imposing, they march forward, irresistible, to claim what has been denied down the centuries. In a history of modern society, you could place these pictures side by side to show how, in just half a century, the "poor" became the organised proletariat, and charity gave way to socialism. Which of these paintings matches most closely the way we talk about British society now, and the way it will be reshaped by George Osborne's spending cuts? It is of course the older image, the regressive, patronising, sentimental Victorian painting of the "poor". The poor are not always with us. In the 20th century they became part of the working class, labour, the proletariat. Now they are back. " Spending review axe falls on the poor ," was this week's big story. The Times editorial on Thursday, while broadly welcoming the assault on the deficit, worried about the effects of these measures on "the poor". In every anxious or angry analysis of the swingeing impact on welfare and benefits, the words "the poor" and "poor people" keep recurring. These terms are perfectly accurate.

But they also betray a chilling change in our society that has taken decades to mature and now, with this velvet-gloved, iron-fisted government, seems about to be set in stone as the new social order. This is the death of the working class as a political force, and the redefinition of society in pre-socialist terms as a hierarchy of rich and poor. The fact is, the poor are made to look isolated, vulnerable and politically harmless. Look again at Millais's child beggars; the painting, by the way, is in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery . He portrays them at the very edge of the human community, cast out of mainstream British society which looks so cosy in the distance. They are set apart by their poverty. They will never threaten anyone else. They will suffer and die. By contrast, the very definition of the working class in Pellizza da Volpedo's painting is collective strength: poor proletarians and educated artisans unite in struggle. The poor are pitiable. The working class is revolutionary. Or not. In reality, as Osborne surely intuits, people can stand a lot of poverty in others.

The "poor" can be seen as scroungers, workshy, benefit frauds – you can say what you like about them. They are the Other. John Everett Millais: Victorian Pre-Raphaelite Artist John Everett Millais Ophelia (1852) Tate Collection, London John Everett Millais (1829-96) The Victorian English painter and book illustrator John Everett Millais - associated initially with the Pre-Raphaelites - was an infant prodigy, who became an extremely rich and fashionable portraitist. Indeed, his virtuoso portrait art , at times on a par with other 19th-century greats like John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins , helped him to become one of the first "rock-star" celebrities of English figurative painting . A hugely visible figure in Victorian art , he was elected President of the Royal Academy in London. Many paintings by John Everett Millais are now available as prints in the form of poster art . Self-Portrait (Undated) For a list of the most important portraitist, history painters and landscape artists in oils and watercolours, during the For information and facts about famous artists from England, see: See: Art Definition, Meaning .

Biography Millais was born in Southampton. His family, having lived for some time in Jersey and northern France, moved in 1838 to London, where his precocious talent could be properly developed. Between the ages of 11 and 17 he attended the Royal Academy Schools, becoming the youngest-ever pupil. His first exhibited oil was the conventional romantic Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru (1846; Victoria and Albert Museum, London). Pre-Raphaelites In 1848, along with two other young and dissatisfied artists, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) and William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Millais founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. A later member was Edward Burne-Jones , while other associates included Ford Madox Brown (1821-93) and Frederic Leighton (1830-96). Exhibited the following year, his Lorenzo and Isabella (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) shows the minute detail, the pristine colour , the symbolism , and the use of friends as models.

Christ in the House of His Parents (1850; Tate Gallery, London) applied the same principles to religious subject matter. It was attacked for its non-idealized depiction of the Holy Family, while its stylized, almost ritualistic quality associated it disastrously with the dreaded encroachment of the Roman Church and "pope-ish" asceticism. WORLDS TOP ARTISTS History, styles and development. The pictures he exhibited in 1851 were also badly received. A Huguenot (1851; private collection) won great popularity, however, and its pathetic theme of lovers parted by historical circumstances reoccurred in The Proscribed Royalist (1853; private collection), The Black Brunswicker (1860; Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight), and others. The two-figure formula removed the need for more complex compositions, which Millais seems to have found difficult. His best-known picture, Ophelia (1851-2; Tate Gallery, London), illustrates his working method during this time - the setting painted meticulously from nature during the summer and the figure added from a model in the studio during the winter - ready for the Royal Academy exhibition in May.

Growing Success While he was painting the portrait of the eminent art critic John Ruskin , staged on a Scottish waterfall (1854; private collection), Millais fell in love with his sitter's wife, Effie. Soon after her divorce from Ruskin they married, and the first of eight children was born in 1856. Family commitments inevitably made Millais conscious of the need to sell his work, which he did with mounting success, earning by the 1880s some £30,000 a year. In the later 1850s he created a series of pictures whose power lay in the evocation of a general mood rather than the description of a particular situation. The most atmospheric is Autumn Leaves (1856; City of Manchester Art Gallery), in which the budding youth of a group of girls is set against the seasonal decay of natural things: dead leaves burning at dusk. The conjunction was calculated to induce, he claimed, "the deepest religious reflection".

Landscape and figures interact in a similar way in other works, such as The Blind Girl (1856; City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery), in which the beauty of the scenery intensifies the subject's pathos, and The Vale of Rest (1859; Tate Gallery, London), a rather strange image of nuns digging a grave in the gathering gloom of evening. Illustrations Millais had always demonstrated an immense talent for drawing and his many finished pen-and-ink drawings of the earlier 1850s, for example The Race-Meeting (1853; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), a scene reminiscent of contemporary novels, led him naturally to illustration, an art form he took up with the edition of Tennyson's poems published by Moxon in 1857. Throughout the 1860s he was a prolific illustrator, both for magazines, notably Once a Week, and for novels, especially those of Trollope. Membership of Royal Academy Millais' painting technique, already losing its Pre-Raphaelite meticulousness, became increasingly broad from now on, enabling him to work more quickly and on larger canvases.

He admired English 18th-century portraitists and the Old Masters , and when in 1868 he was made a full member of the London Royal Academy, he named his presentation picture Souvenir of Velazquez (1868; Royal Academy of Arts, London). Another 19th century Royal Academician who became close friends with Millais was Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-73), the highly popular animal painter. Portrait Painting First in a line of portrait studies of single children - often his own - was My First Sermon (1863; Guildhall Art Gallery, London), depicting a little girl in a pew. Cherry Ripe (1879; private collection) in the style of Joshua Reynolds , the much more painterly manner of which exemplifies the evolution of Millais' style, was published as a fine art colour print, selling 600,000 copies. He also dealt in historical child-subjects such as The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870; Tate Gallery, London).

Another category was the young lady in 18th-century costume; the painting Clarissa (1887; private collection), modeled by his daughter Sophie, imitates Gainsborough's portrait The Honourable Mrs Graham (1777; National Gallery of Scotland , Edinburgh). Landscape Painting Millais' first major pure landscape painting was Chill October (1870; private collection). Autumn and winter visits to Scotland, during which he did much hunting and shooting as well as landscape-painting, came to provide a welcome escape from the increasing pressures of his London portrait practice. His depictions of often rather bleak scenes were intended to suggest human sentiments, especially loneliness and a sense of the impassivity of Nature. They show technical subtlety in rendering effects of wind, dew, and mist, and sensitivity in capturing the mood of a certain season or time of day, as for example in Lingering Autumn (1890; Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight). Hearts are Trumps (1872; Tate Gallery, London), showing three ladies around a card-table, is an early example of his society portraiture. Such luxuriously dressed female sitters exercised Millais' now bold and rich handling of paint.

With male subjects he concentrated on the delineation of strong character in the features: for example in the two portraits of Gladstone (1879, National Portrait Gallery, London ; and 1885, Christ Church, Oxford). Outline is a particularly telling aspect of his work, seen to effect in Mrs Jopling (1879; Collection of L.M. Jopling, on loan to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). With its three-quarter-length figure set against a plain background, this compares in simplicity of statement with contemporary work by the classical Impressionist Edouard Manet . Later Life Concerning Millais' several studies of old age, the patriotic North-West Passage (1874; Tate Gallery, London), which shows a retired sea-dog, is the most attractive, especially in its colouring. The Ruling Passion (1885; Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum), depicting a bedridden ornithologist, typifies Millais' later preference for dark tones and an overall impression of brownness. This is also seen in the late religious paintings , for instance St Stephen (1895; Tate Gallery, London).

Created a baronet in 1885, and elected President of the London Royal Academy in 1896, Millais commanded the highest personal popularity and professional esteem. Paintings by John Everett Millais Works by Sir John Everett Millais can be seen in the world's best art museums , including the Tate Collection London, the London Royal Academy of Arts, and the J Paul Getty Museum Los Angeles.  For more biographies, see: Famous Painters .  For details of major art periods/movements, see: History of Art .  For more information about modern art, see: Homepage . ENCYCLOPEDIA OF VISUAL ARTISTS 1000+ images about Artist john Everett Millais on Pinterest | Apple blossoms, Oil on canvas and Engagement Farmer's daughter, John Everett Millais @Mike Tucker Tucker-Mari April (this reminds me of our abuela when she was young and working in her dad's farm, I know I wasn't there .....but from her stories....) See More Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery | The Reading Art Project | Page 2 The Reading Art Project Serena Trowbridge Leave a comment An afternoon telling stories to children at BMAG was great fun.

Using stories they had developed themselves based on the paintings in the Pre-Raphaelite galleries, students told stories to small groups of children, and we also read a few fairy tales and poems which were relevant to different paintings. It made me think about the different uses that stories have – and about how we can look at a painting and see a completely different story, if we want. The children who joined in were fascinated, thankfully! I spoke to a father of three girls who said he was delighted to have found an event which engaged his girls in art, encouraging them to look closely at the pictures and to think about what might be happening in the paintings, so it was definitely a worthwhile event! This slideshow requires JavaScript. Serena Trowbridge 1 Comment Registration for the Reading Art conference, 27th-28th May, is now open – click here to book your ticket! Tickets are available for one day or both days, and I’ll post the programme as soon as possible. The event is open to anyone so if you’re interested then do come along!

Easter Storytelling event for children of all ages at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery On Wednesday 6th and Thursday 7th April, 1-3pm, students from Birmingham City University’s School of English will be telling stories inspired by Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the Pre-Raphaelite Galleries, as part of the Reading Art project . This is a free event and no booking is required – just drop in and find us. The students attended a storytelling workshop with professional storyteller Dawn Powell , where they learned a range of skills about telling stories. They then developed their own stories based on the Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the gallery. They are new to this but have learned a lot and their stories reflect their own creativity and enthusiasm, and it promises to be an entertaining event! Please come along and see us! Serena Trowbridge Leave a comment As part of the Reading Art project, five public talks have been scheduled for April. They all take place at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery . No need to book – just turn up. Each talk will last up to an hour including time for questions.

Saturday 9th April, 12 noon ‘Fairy, Weaver, Seër’: Incarnations of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ in the art of the Pre-Raphaelites and Their Followers Maria Cohut, University of Warwick Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘The Lady of Shalott’ was the source of inspiration for numerous artists throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond, and it was an especial favourite with the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers. William Holman Hunt’s take on the subject is perhaps the most famous, closely followed by John William Waterhouse’s later depictions. The lecture will explore these, as well as some of the less-known Pre-Raphaelite and Neo-Pre-Raphaelite pictorial representations of the Lady of Shalott. Tennyson’s Lady opened the way for newer, more challenging and complex explorations of femininity. AV Room (Meet in Round Room).

Tuesday 12th April, 12 noon Pre-Raphaelitism and Poetry: looking back in time Dr Serena Trowbridge, Birmingham City University This gallery talk will explore how the Pre-Raphaelites engage with literature and literary history to create a medieval aesthetic which fitted in with their artistic and literary ethos. We will look particularly at reworkings of Dante, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s interest in Arthurian literature, focusing on the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Alexander Munro and Ford Madox Brown, among others. Meet in Pre-Raphaelite galleries Saturday 16th April, 12 noon Performing Aestheticism: Aesthetic Dress as Performance Louise Chapman, Birmingham City University This talk will be considering the changing gender roles of women within the Aesthetic movement, and discussing the manner in which dress within the movement was part of an Aesthetic ‘lifestyle choice,’ and how dress as an art form was ‘performed’ within these elite artistic circles. Aesthetic dress could be considered as being oppositional, anti-fashion and sub-cultural in its representation within these artistic social circles and within the fashion cycle.

Meet in Pre-Raphaelite galleries Tuesday 19th April, 12 noon ‘Poetry is painting that speaks’ – Birthing the female gaze Bethany Rivers, Poet Bethany Rivers will be reading from her forthcoming collection of ekphrastic poetry, called Off the Wall, (due out later this year from Indigo Dreams Publishing) and describing her process of transposing a visual representation into a verbal representation. This will include poems written on the iconic female figures of Ophelia, Lizzie Siddal and Persephone (Proserpine), with references to the act of rebellion against the assumed gender of male being assigned to the viewer, and explorations of the various possibilities of a ‘female gaze’. AV Room (Meet in Round Room) Tuesday 26th April, 12 noon Asleep or Hallucinating? Dr Richard Schofield, Birmingham City University Richard Schofield will describe the process that a visual artist/illustrator goes through when interpreting the written word and transposing it into a different medium. He will refer to a recent project in which he responded to the novel Pincher Martin, by William Golding (1956), producing a compact visual ‘equivalent’.

This creative journey required a good degree of immersion, that undoubtedly surpasses a literal analysis of the written word. This is an illustrated talk which will also relate other experiences, references and research which contributed to this process. AV Room (Meet in Round Room) Serena Trowbridge Leave a comment Today we held a storytelling workshop in the Pre-Raphaelite galleries at BMAG. Storyteller Dawn Powell explained to students from BCU School of English how storytelling works, and helped them to develop their own stories around some of the paintings in the collection. As I’ve said before, Pre-Raphaelite paintings are often narrative, not only inspired by literature but with biographical and personal narratives too, and often with layers of symbolism and imagery which inspire further stories. It was this last aspect which came to the fore today: to me, it was a bit strange to hear stories being told which bear no relation to the painting’s stated meaning, but then, these stories are to be told to children, and many of the stories are simply not suitable for children (Medea, for example). And after all, why shouldn’t the paintings be open to interpretation?

So the students put their own interpretations on the paintings, making up stories which fitted what they could see, often combining two or more pictures in the gallery. Having become very familiar with the stories of the paintings, including Beata Beatrix, The Last of England and The Proscribed Royalist, I found it really eye-opening to hear students’ creative takes on what these paintings suggested to them, from stories about children who opened a forbidden box, to the journey of a postman. In the Easter holidays the students will be telling stories to children in the galleries, and I can’t wait to hear them. Serena Trowbridge 3 Comments Isabella by John Everett Millais, 1849 (National Museums Liverpool) I spend a lot of time looking at Pre-Raphaelite paintings, in galleries, in exhibitions, online and in books. And every exhibition, like every book, has its own individual approach and shows me something new. It goes without saying, then, that the Pre-Raphaelites: Beauty and Rebellion exhibition at the Walker Gallery, Liverpool , curated by Christopher Newall, with its own take on the subject and its own juxtaposition of works, got me thinking.

The premise of the exhibition is to situate Liverpool as a centre of Pre-Raphaelite patronage, and as a city which, in the second half of the nineteenth century, was receptive to such ‘rebellious’ art. Much is made of the wealthy Liverpool patrons who bought Pre-Raphaelite paintings, developed collections, and encouraged new painters to be open to the influences of this new school of thought in art. This led to a ‘Liverpool School’ of artists influenced by the PRB, interested in their style, form and narrative approach. This much is demonstrated convincingly, and I encountered some interested works by Liverpool artists whose work I hadn’t seen before. However, having been based in Birmingham for many years, I tend to feel that some of the claims for Liverpool are slightly overstated: No other provincial town or city was so receptive to this rebellious yet reforming artistic movement. It is a testament to the independence of taste and intellectual freedom in the North West in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The relationship of Birmingham and the Birmingham School to Pre-Raphaelitism aside, the exhibition makes a good case for Liverpool’s claims; from collectors and patrons to indigenous painters, now enshrined in the collections of the Walker and the Lady Lever galleries, Liverpool embraced the movement, even awarding the Liverpool Academy annual prize to Pre-Raphaelite works on several occasions (including Holman Hunt’s Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (1857) and Millais’s The Blind Girl (1856) – both of which are now in Birmingham’s collection). Every painting on display was exhibited in Liverpool at some point during the nineteenth century, which is telling about the Liverpudlian appetite for Pre-Raphaelitism (something which quotations on the wall remind us of at every turn). The first thing you see as you enter is Millais’s striking Isabella (1848-9), which is one of those works that has come to symbolise the early stages of Pre-Raphaelitism.

A narrative painting, engaged with literary sources (Keats’s poem, ‘ Isabella, or The Pot of Basil ‘), full of symbolism, it brings a story to life: the uncomfortable dinner scene, with the lovers in the foreground and, in the background, oblivious to the drama about to unfold, a man is draining his drink, looking so prosaically real one can almost hear the resulting belch. Does this realism, I wonder, bringing a narrative to life, do what films do now, making stories appear before us, embodied by the Pre-Raphaelite lens? Burd Helen by William Lindsay Windus, 1856 (National Museums Liverpool) I was interested by the paintings of Liverpool artist William Lindsay Windus, such as Burd Helen (1856), based on a Scottish border ballad. The notice tells me that Windus was encouraged by collector John Miller to visit London and see the Pre-Raphaelite works on display; this was the result. Certainly in its narrative origin and its detailed background you can see the influence, though I don’t much like it as a painting, personally. Equally interesting is The Rainbow (1858) by William Davis.

Though the PRB liked Davis’s work, Ruskin described this one as ‘an offensive daub’, causing Davis to roll up the edge with the rainbow on, which would probably improve it, as the rest of the painting is much better; I wonder if he retitled it, though. What is particularly interesting about this painting is the effect of the light, though: that effect of bright sunshine through dark clouds following a thunderstorm. In this was it is reminiscent of Holman Hunt’s The Pretty Baa Lambs, with a similarly striking depiction of light. It also recalled for me The Blind Girl, with a rainbow and a similar light effect. James Campbell’s Twilight, Trudging Homeward (1857) with a small, sightless girl being walked home, was apparently likely to be directly inspired by The Blind Girl, which was exhibited in Liverpool the same year. Laura Freeman, in her scathing and slightly hysterical review of the exhibition in The Spectator (I suspect the exhibition confirmed her existing views of the Pre-Raphaelites) particularly took exception to Holman Hunt’s Little Nell and her Grandfather (1845).

In that instance, I’m inclined to agree with her: it seems ‘sloshy’, to use the PRB’s own term, in both form and subject. Of course Little Nell herself is an example of high Victorian sentimentality, and it strikes me that Hunt took an overly-sentimental narrative and overlaid it with even more of the stuff. Apparently he accidentally used salad oil in painting the sky; perhaps that’s the problem. This isn’t the only work here inspired by The Old Curiosity Shop; Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s Kit’s Writing Lesson (1852), despite criticism from W. M. Rossetti that his realism led to too many mistakes, seems less cloying and more appealing.

May Morning on Magdalen Tower by Holman Hunt, 1890 (National Museums Liverpool) I’m also inclined to agree with Freeman concerning May Morning on Magdalen Tower (Holman Hunt, 1890): there are many things to like here, including the lovely touch of the boy in the middle shading his eyes with his hand from the glare of the rising sun, the feeling of Spring and celebration, and the multi-faceted imagery of faith, but somehow the colours seem garish and wrong to me, the style outworn. There is a smaller, elaborately framed version at BMAG, and I think I prefer it smaller; it’s less…obvious. Every Pre-Raphaelite show will have its standout pieces, usually very famous ones: here, one of those is Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat, which is one of those paintings people often love to hate. I have to say, it’s growing on me. Its narrative is biblical, and not particularly appealing; it’s an uncompromising painting which doesn’t try to seduce the viewer – unlike some of the other blockbusters here, particularly Rossetti’s later works, this isn’t a seductive people-pleaser.

The purple hills are so unexpected – in fact all the use of colour here is unexpected – yet effective. The poor goat, faced with the bones of his predecessors, facing death despite his own blamelessness, works on a literal and a metaphorical level. The Scapegoat by William Holman Hunt, 1854-6 (National Museums Liverpool) There are many biblical topics in the paintings here, but some of the most striking, to me, are Dyce’s deceptively simple paintings David in the Wilderness, Man of Sorrows and Garden of Gethsemane. Full of rocks and geological details as Dyce’s paintings always are, these beautiful small paintings are entirely dependent on a knowledge of the source for understanding and appreciation: the wild landscapes in which these men wander reflect the spiritual and emotional turbulence which also makes them widely relevant, reflecting human suffering as well as the situations of particular biblical figures. The paintings also suggest the peace that is to be found in nature, even if they lack drama. This exhibition does a good job of covering a proportion of the PRB’s literary sources; a Shakespearean painting here is Arthur Hughes’s As You Like It.

Actually, I’m disappointed by this: it seems overly complex and contrived, as if the artist simply couldn’t decide what he wanted to depict from the play, so tried to put too much in. Hughes’s other paintings here are less narrative and perhaps more sentimental (such as The Woodsman’s Child) but have a more direct appeal. As You Like It seems to beat around the bush too much. Study of an Ash Trunk by Albert Joseph Moore, 1857 (Ashmolean Museum) As an alternative to more traditional hanging, there are a couple of sections here entitled Paintings in a Victorian House, with a range of smaller paintings hung on Morris wallpaper as, presumably, they might have been in the house of a collector such as the banker George Rae. There are no labels here, so one is reliant on a handlist, but it works well in its implication of the intimacy in which these paintings might once have been hung, side by side in a less formal setting. One of these paintings, Study of an Ash Trunk by Albert Joseph Moore, particularly appealed: it’s small and unassuming, but with the green, fresh detail the Pre-Raphaelites loved.

I said that every show has its standout pieces: for me, it was Millais’s The Eve of St Agnes (1863). Voyeuristic as this painting is, the stillness and hushed reverence of Madeline’s room, the beauty of the dim light and the whole aura of Pre-Raphaeliteness about it draws me in, a feeling which is enhanced by my fondness for the source text, too, the eponymous poem by Keats . Holman Hunt’s The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro (1847-57) is also here, smaller and less dramatic, but with a very different depiction of the tension of the poem; Hunt’s painting dramatises the fear of the couple as they try to leave, in a moment of action, while Millais offers us a tableau, a moment which is very like the scene that Porphyro sees himself: here, we are invited to be voyeurs along with him, seeing what he sees.

The Salutation of Beatrice by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1881-2, private collection For many, the blockbusters here will be the later Rossettis: The Blessed Damozel (1875-9) (a painting which accompanies one of Rossetti’s poems, a topic for another post), the lush Venus Verticordia (1863-8) and Monna Vanna (1866) in particular. Rossetti’s lush, voluptuous over-ripeness dominates this end of the room; however, my preference is for The Salutation of Beatrice (1881-2). I think I prefer Rossetti’s paintings when they are less decorative, more medieval, more narrative-based. This is equally true, in my view, of Burne-Jones: the exhibition concludes with two large and impressive paintings. One is The Beguiling of Merlin (1873-7), in which Burne-Jones draws on the Arthurian narratives so loved by the PRB, creating an intimacy between Nimue and Merlin as she weaves a spell to bind him in sleep, a concept reflected in the framing branches in the painting.

The other is Venus Discordia (1873), a large unfinished painting from a planned triptych of the fall of Troy. This is a strange painting, with a power that I find rather inexplicable. Venus weeps as she sees the destruction around her, and the story and the historical context of the work are carefully woven into it, and yet there is something about it which reminds me of Albert Moore’s langorous aestheticism, in which a scene is simply a scene, with no deeper meaning; there is something almost Symbolist about this. Beauty and Rebellion is about a great deal more than Liverpool, then; it offers different painters and in some unexpected juxtapositions it inspires new views of the Pre-Raphaelites. It’s a pleasure to see old friends and discover works new to me, too; and it seems that every place has its own version of, or approach to, Pre-Raphaelitism; Liverpool’s is very satisfying. It’s also a reminder that art and business can go hand in hand; these intellectual, art-loving leaders of industry who supported Pre-Raphaelite painters are too often unsung, and without them art history might have taken a very different turn.

Venus Discordia by Edward Burne-Jones, 1872-3 (National Museum of Wales) Serena Trowbridge 5 Comments Medea, Frederick Sandys (1866-8), Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Frederick Sandys’ painting Medea (1866-8) is a divisive one: now as when it was first exhibited, opinions are very divided as to its beauty and power. Sandys was drawn to mythical, dangerous femme fatales (as were most of the Pre-Raphaelites), and Medea is certainly one of the most frightening. Her story – most famously delineated in Euripides’ play – is one of tragedy, and Euripides depicts her as a tragic victim who brings about more tragedy. A sorceress whose ancestry includes gods, she marries Jason (he of the golden fleece). In Euripides’ version, which begins after the couple marry, Jason has deserted Medea for another woman, and Medea, driven mad with jealousy and despair, murders the other woman, and her own two sons, to revenge herself upon Jason.

Much is made of the tragedy and pathos of Medea’s love of her children and sorrow at their death in Euripides’ play, as the tragic mother says her last farewell to her sons: I wish you happiness, but not here in this world. What is here your father took. O how good to hold you! How delicate the skin, how sweet the breath of children! Go, go! I am no longer able, no longer To look upon you. I am overcome by sorrow. I know indeed what evil I intend to do, But stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury, Fury that brings upon mortals the greatest evils. Medea is a strong woman, who addresses the women of Corinth on the wrongs men do to women, lamenting the restricted lives they must lead, and their fate when abandoned. In Sandys’ picture, she is enchanting a cloak which will destroy Jason’s new wife, Glauce, by bursting into flames. The expression on Medea’s face is what gives the picture its power: she looks not at what she is doing, but away out of the picture, as if frantically picturing the damage she can do.

There is pathos and sadness as well as fury and even madness in her look, which may account for its rejection from the Royal Academy and the view of many that it verged on indecency. It is a picture that engages with a very specific moment in the drama, then, depicting Medea as Sandys imagined her from his reading of the story. Yet his work also inspired: Alfred Bate Richards, after seeing the painting during its completion and afterwards, wrote Medea: A Poem (London: Chapman & Hall, 1869). Richards was a writer and journalist, previously a lawyer, who knew Thackeray and Dickens as well as Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Richards says that ‘If enthusiasm could always command ability, my part would not be unworthily executed, for I certainly began to write con amore‘.His interest is in somehow describing and providing another dimension to Sandys’ work: How far the story of Medea is a fable is immaterial to my treatment of Medea as a human being … I have dealt with a great artist’s conception of a flesh-and-blood Medea… He admits that he can offer ‘but a suggestion of the beauties of the picture’ – but it is a very long suggestion (62 pages), and while it has some merit as poetry, and interest too, as ekphrasis, it is often rather old-fashioned even for its time, given to florid excesses of description, archaisms, cliches, and calling on various Muses. Yet the remarkably vivid descriptive passages do conjure shades of Medea, both woman and picture, particularly in describing the horror of her life and its tragic events.There is much digression considering the transience of life and love, treachery, fickleness and the evil hand of fate; these are often reminiscent of graveyard poetry, with lurid and bloody spectacles interspersed.

(‘When o’er the treetops suddenly doth fall/Night’s mantle like black cyprus funeral pall’). The tale is not really outlined; it is a lyrical outpouring imagining the state of being Medea, whom he describes as ‘The stately form of Queenlike Tragedy’, and it is this ‘form’ and its soul with which he is concerned, alongside a contrasting of pagan and Christian, in terms of civilisation and morality. Unsexed, unholy and abhorred Curst parricidal daughter, bride And toy of gilded shame. Repeatedly Richards returns to the picture itself, sometimes addressing it and sometimes Medea, sometimes (possibly) a watching Chorus, in an ekphrastic performance of immediacy. There is a clear fascination with the horror of her act: he dwells on the fear of the children, the unnatural act of killing them, and implies he would never have considered writing such a ghastly tale if it weren’t for Sandys’ painting. He concludes with a moral, that God can still forgive and humanity should not condemn (which is rather hypocritical after what he has already said).

The concluding couplet states: ‘It is our faithless frenzy to confess/Which Heaven might not forgive, if Heaven were less.’ Richards is interested in art and poetry, then, and this is exemplified in a footnote in which he explains that he has at certain points tried to conjure up the feeling of some of Turner’s paintings, in words: not any particular painting, just an impression of Turner. Here, however, he is much more specific, calling on aspects of Sandys’ picture in detail, ‘reading’ into the painting and putting it into words. Richards shows none of Sandys’ specificity; the particular moment Sandys chose is diffused in the poem, the clarity obscured, yet, somehow, the focus sharpened by the concentration on the woman herself. The art of Euripides, of Sandys and of Richards, though not all equal (in my view) illuminate each other and speak to each other. Note: If you’re interested, I found Richards’ poem at The Hive in Worcester. There aren’t many copies around (one source I read said only 8 extant).

Pre-Raphaelites | Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery April 2014 marks the centenary of the artist Edward Robert Hughes (1851-1914), who painted perhaps the most popular watercolour in our collection: Night with her Train of Stars (1912). Night with her Train of Stars, 1912 (Birmingham Museums) Hughes was a close associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was the nephew of the painter Arthur Hughes, modelled for Rossetti, and worked for many years as the studio assistant of William Holman Hunt. However, although Hughes also made a successful career as an artist in his own right, he is still little known. At Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, research over the past 7 years has been uncovering new information about Hughes’s life and career and tracing paintings, drawings and watercolours by him in public and private collections in the UK and overseas. We’re now planning a major exhibition of his work – the first in the 100 years since his death – which will open at BMAG in October 2015.

ER Hughes aged 17 by his friend Charles Fairfax Murray, 1869 (Birmingham Museums) Hughes died suddenly on 23 April 1914 in St Albans and is buried in Hatfield Road Cemetery. His funeral in St Albans Cathedral was the largest ever held there, attended by his many friends, fellow artists, and pupils from his life-drawing class in London. Romeland Cottage, St Albans: Hughes’s home 1913-14 St Albans Cathedral with Hughes’s home in the background Grave of ER Hughes and his wife Emily Eliza, Hatfield Road Cemetery, St Albans The 100th anniversary of Hughes’s death, 23 April 2014, was marked with a special lecture in St Albans Town Hall followed by an evening reception in his honour – a very happy occasion.

Guests at the reception Cllr Annie Brewster, Mayor of St Albans City & District; Professor Geraint John, President of St Albans Civic Society; Lady Verulam The Dean of St Albans, Dr Jeffrey John, proposing a toast to Hughes A special display celebrating Hughes’s life and work can be seen in the North Transept of St Albans Cathedral until Tuesday 6 May. ER Hughes display in St Albans Cathedral Curator Spot! Victoria Osborne talks about Paolo and Francesca by Alexander Munro Victoria Osborne talks about the Alexander Munro sculpture inspired by the tragic story of Paolo and Francesca. Francesca, engaged to be married against her will, falls in love with her fiance’s younger brother Paola. When this is discovered, they are murdered. The sculpture shows the moment when, reading of the love of Lancelot for Guinevere, they are drawn to their first kiss. This video is subtitled. Start the video and click on the CC at the bottom of the video to bring up the subtitles (also known as Closed Captions).

The Blind Girl – World Tour (Exhibitions) 1856-2007 The Blind Girl was painted by John Everett Millais and completed in 1856. It was acquired by City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1892. The popularity of this painting is reflected by the many exhibitions it has appeared in all around the world. This map follows most, although not all, of the places it has been. Total distance recorded on the map: 49,690 miles (79.968 km) – but actually much more as I haven’t included all the trips back to Birmingham! The Blind Girl can usually be found in the Pre-Raphaelite Galleries at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (home!). The Blind Girl by John Everett Millais. Beauty and Rebellion: Pre-Raphaelites in Liverpool | The Reading Art Project The Reading Art Project Serena Trowbridge 3 Comments Isabella by John Everett Millais, 1849 (National Museums Liverpool) I spend a lot of time looking at Pre-Raphaelite paintings, in galleries, in exhibitions, online and in books.

And every exhibition, like every book, has its own individual approach and shows me something new. It goes without saying, then, that the Pre-Raphaelites: Beauty and Rebellion exhibition at the Walker Gallery, Liverpool , curated by Christopher Newall, with its own take on the subject and its own juxtaposition of works, got me thinking. The premise of the exhibition is to situate Liverpool as a centre of Pre-Raphaelite patronage, and as a city which, in the second half of the nineteenth century, was receptive to such ‘rebellious’ art. Much is made of the wealthy Liverpool patrons who bought Pre-Raphaelite paintings, developed collections, and encouraged new painters to be open to the influences of this new school of thought in art. This led to a ‘Liverpool School’ of artists influenced by the PRB, interested in their style, form and narrative approach. This much is demonstrated convincingly, and I encountered some interested works by Liverpool artists whose work I hadn’t seen before. However, having been based in Birmingham for many years, I tend to feel that some of the claims for Liverpool are slightly overstated: No other provincial town or city was so receptive to this rebellious yet reforming artistic movement.

It is a testament to the independence of taste and intellectual freedom in the North West in the second half of the nineteenth century. The relationship of Birmingham and the Birmingham School to Pre-Raphaelitism aside, the exhibition makes a good case for Liverpool’s claims; from collectors and patrons to indigenous painters, now enshrined in the collections of the Walker and the Lady Lever galleries, Liverpool embraced the movement, even awarding the Liverpool Academy annual prize to Pre-Raphaelite works on several occasions (including Holman Hunt’s Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (1857) and Millais’s The Blind Girl (1856) – both of which are now in Birmingham’s collection). Every painting on display was exhibited in Liverpool at some point during the nineteenth century, which is telling about the Liverpudlian appetite for Pre-Raphaelitism (something which quotations on the wall remind us of at every turn). The first thing you see as you enter is Millais’s striking Isabella (1848-9), which is one of those works that has come to symbolise the early stages of Pre-Raphaelitism.

A narrative painting, engaged with literary sources (Keats’s poem, ‘ Isabella, or The Pot of Basil ‘), full of symbolism, it brings a story to life: the uncomfortable dinner scene, with the lovers in the foreground and, in the background, oblivious to the drama about to unfold, a man is draining his drink, looking so prosaically real one can almost hear the resulting belch. Does this realism, I wonder, bringing a narrative to life, do what films do now, making stories appear before us, embodied by the Pre-Raphaelite lens? Burd Helen by William Lindsay Windus, 1856 (National Museums Liverpool) I was interested by the paintings of Liverpool artist William Lindsay Windus, such as Burd Helen (1856), based on a Scottish border ballad. The notice tells me that Windus was encouraged by collector John Miller to visit London and see the Pre-Raphaelite works on display; this was the result. Certainly in its narrative origin and its detailed background you can see the influence, though I don’t much like it as a painting, personally. Equally interesting is The Rainbow (1858) by William Davis.

Though the PRB liked Davis’s work, Ruskin described this one as ‘an offensive daub’, causing Davis to roll up the edge with the rainbow on, which would probably improve it, as the rest of the painting is much better; I wonder if he retitled it, though. What is particularly interesting about this painting is the effect of the light, though: that effect of bright sunshine through dark clouds following a thunderstorm. In this was it is reminiscent of Holman Hunt’s The Pretty Baa Lambs, with a similarly striking depiction of light. It also recalled for me The Blind Girl, with a rainbow and a similar light effect. James Campbell’s Twilight, Trudging Homeward (1857) with a small, sightless girl being walked home, was apparently likely to be directly inspired by The Blind Girl, which was exhibited in Liverpool the same year. Laura Freeman, in her scathing and slightly hysterical review of the exhibition in The Spectator (I suspect the exhibition confirmed her existing views of the Pre-Raphaelites) particularly took exception to Holman Hunt’s Little Nell and her Grandfather (1845).

In that instance, I’m inclined to agree with her: it seems ‘sloshy’, to use the PRB’s own term, in both form and subject. Of course Little Nell herself is an example of high Victorian sentimentality, and it strikes me that Hunt took an overly-sentimental narrative and overlaid it with even more of the stuff. Apparently he accidentally used salad oil in painting the sky; perhaps that’s the problem. This isn’t the only work here inspired by The Old Curiosity Shop; Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s Kit’s Writing Lesson (1852), despite criticism from W. M. Rossetti that his realism led to too many mistakes, seems less cloying and more appealing.

May Morning on Magdalen Tower by Holman Hunt, 1890 (National Museums Liverpool) I’m also inclined to agree with Freeman concerning May Morning on Magdalen Tower (Holman Hunt, 1890): there are many things to like here, including the lovely touch of the boy in the middle shading his eyes with his hand from the glare of the rising sun, the feeling of Spring and celebration, and the multi-faceted imagery of faith, but somehow the colours seem garish and wrong to me, the style outworn. There is a smaller, elaborately framed version at BMAG, and I think I prefer it smaller; it’s less…obvious. Every Pre-Raphaelite show will have its standout pieces, usually very famous ones: here, one of those is Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat, which is one of those paintings people often love to hate. I have to say, it’s growing on me. Its narrative is biblical, and not particularly appealing; it’s an uncompromising painting which doesn’t try to seduce the viewer – unlike some of the other blockbusters here, particularly Rossetti’s later works, this isn’t a seductive people-pleaser.

The purple hills are so unexpected – in fact all the use of colour here is unexpected – yet effective. The poor goat, faced with the bones of his predecessors, facing death despite his own blamelessness, works on a literal and a metaphorical level. The Scapegoat by William Holman Hunt, 1854-6 (National Museums Liverpool) There are many biblical topics in the paintings here, but some of the most striking, to me, are Dyce’s deceptively simple paintings David in the Wilderness, Man of Sorrows and Garden of Gethsemane. Full of rocks and geological details as Dyce’s paintings always are, these beautiful small paintings are entirely dependent on a knowledge of the source for understanding and appreciation: the wild landscapes in which these men wander reflect the spiritual and emotional turbulence which also makes them widely relevant, reflecting human suffering as well as the situations of particular biblical figures. The paintings also suggest the peace that is to be found in nature, even if they lack drama. This exhibition does a good job of covering a proportion of the PRB’s literary sources; a Shakespearean painting here is Arthur Hughes’s As You Like It.

Actually, I’m disappointed by this: it seems overly complex and contrived, as if the artist simply couldn’t decide what he wanted to depict from the play, so tried to put too much in. Hughes’s other paintings here are less narrative and perhaps more sentimental (such as The Woodsman’s Child) but have a more direct appeal. As You Like It seems to beat around the bush too much. Study of an Ash Trunk by Albert Joseph Moore, 1857 (Ashmolean Museum) As an alternative to more traditional hanging, there are a couple of sections here entitled Paintings in a Victorian House, with a range of smaller paintings hung on Morris wallpaper as, presumably, they might have been in the house of a collector such as the banker George Rae. There are no labels here, so one is reliant on a handlist, but it works well in its implication of the intimacy in which these paintings might once have been hung, side by side in a less formal setting. One of these paintings, Study of an Ash Trunk by Albert Joseph Moore, particularly appealed: it’s small and unassuming, but with the green, fresh detail the Pre-Raphaelites loved.

I said that every show has its standout pieces: for me, it was Millais’s The Eve of St Agnes (1863). Voyeuristic as this painting is, the stillness and hushed reverence of Madeline’s room, the beauty of the dim light and the whole aura of Pre-Raphaeliteness about it draws me in, a feeling which is enhanced by my fondness for the source text, too, the eponymous poem by Keats . Holman Hunt’s The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro (1847-57) is also here, smaller and less dramatic, but with a very different depiction of the tension of the poem; Hunt’s painting dramatises the fear of the couple as they try to leave, in a moment of action, while Millais offers us a tableau, a moment which is very like the scene that Porphyro sees himself: here, we are invited to be voyeurs along with him, seeing what he sees.

The Salutation of Beatrice by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1881-2, private collection For many, the blockbusters here will be the later Rossettis: The Blessed Damozel (1875-9) (a painting which accompanies one of Rossetti’s poems, a topic for another post), the lush Venus Verticordia (1863-8) and Monna Vanna (1866) in particular. Rossetti’s lush, voluptuous over-ripeness dominates this end of the room; however, my preference is for The Salutation of Beatrice (1881-2). I think I prefer Rossetti’s paintings when they are less decorative, more medieval, more narrative-based. This is equally true, in my view, of Burne-Jones: the exhibition concludes with two large and impressive paintings. One is The Beguiling of Merlin (1873-7), in which Burne-Jones draws on the Arthurian narratives so loved by the PRB, creating an intimacy between Nimue and Merlin as she weaves a spell to bind him in sleep, a concept reflected in the framing branches in the painting.

The other is Venus Discordia (1873), a large unfinished painting from a planned triptych of the fall of Troy. This is a strange painting, with a power that I find rather inexplicable. Venus weeps as she sees the destruction around her, and the story and the historical context of the work are carefully woven into it, and yet there is something about it which reminds me of Albert Moore’s langorous aestheticism, in which a scene is simply a scene, with no deeper meaning; there is something almost Symbolist about this. Beauty and Rebellion is about a great deal more than Liverpool, then; it offers different painters and in some unexpected juxtapositions it inspires new views of the Pre-Raphaelites. It’s a pleasure to see old friends and discover works new to me, too; and it seems that every place has its own version of, or approach to, Pre-Raphaelitism; Liverpool’s is very satisfying. It’s also a reminder that art and business can go hand in hand; these intellectual, art-loving leaders of industry who supported Pre-Raphaelite painters are too often unsung, and without them art history might have taken a very different turn.

Venus Discordia by Edward Burne-Jones, 1872-3 (National Museum of Wales) Share this:

Question: Who, in 1856, painted the picture "The Blind Girl, now in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery?
Answer: (John Everett) Millais