Art, Myth, and Literature: The Pre-Raphaelites

In this series, we'll explore the movement that stands at the intersection of art and fantasy.

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Ophelia, John Everett Millais ca. 1851-1852. Via Wikimedia Commons.

There is a willow grows askant the brook

That shows his hoary leaves in the glossy stream;

Therewith fantastic garlands did she make

Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name

But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.

In Act 4 of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Queen Gertrude shares devastating news with Laertes—his sister, Ophelia, is dead. Burdened by madness, wild with grief that the man she loved had killed her father, Ophelia fell (or did she jump?) into a brook and drowned.

There on the pendant boughs her crownet weeds

Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,

When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide

And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,

Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds

As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and endued

Unto the element…

In 1851, John Everett Millais would turn to this moment for inspiration. He depicts Ophelia not in a Danish landscape, but in a scene that is quintessentially English. With fastidious care, he spent many months in Surrey painting the brook and its surrounding foliage before turning to the doomed woman. The model for Ophelia was Elizabeth Siddal, a painter who was part of a new movement of artists—those who looked upon the Middle Ages and the Renaissance artists of the 1400s with longing eyes.

… But long it could not be

Till her garments, heavy with their drink,

Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay

To muddy death.¹

In Hamlet, Ophelia’s death happens offstage. It is a moment of ambiguity that continues to haunt literary scholars—did she commit suicide, as the priest implies in Act 5? Was it an accident, as Queen Gertrude conveys in her story? Millais chooses instead to depict Ophelia as a martyr. Floating on her back, her hands open and gaze lifted to the heavens, Ophelia could easily be a saint whose body has been preserved and displayed in a Catholic church.

Google “Pre-Raphaelite,” and John Everett Millais’s Ophelia is sure to be one of the first images that appears. In many ways, it is the poster-child for the Pre-Raphaelite ethos—one in which symbolism, storytelling, and beauty are executed in bold colors and exquisite detail.

Lady Lilith, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Henry Treffry Dunn ca. 1867. Via the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There are two kinds of Pre-Raphaelites: there’s the Brotherhood, and then there’s the wider movement.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was itself a short-lived association, lasting from 1848 to 1853. The Brotherhood was founded by seven British artists and writers (William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens, and Thomas Woolner) who joined together in rebellion against the Royal Academy of Arts. They resented the Royal Academy’s commitment to the techniques of Renaissance master Raphael and the Mannerists who came after him. The Pre-Raphaelites wished to return to the styles that preceded Raphael (hence, Pre-Raphaelite), and found inspiration in medieval and early Renaissance artists.

Then, there is the broader Pre-Raphaelite movement, one that endured long after the original Brotherhood disbanded and some of its members, including Millais, began moving in different directions. The style they pioneered would influence artists for decades to come—among them are Edward Robert Hughes, Evelyn De Morgan, and John William Waterhouse. One can also find echoes of the Pre-Raphaelites in other movements, including the Glasgow Style and Art Nouveau.

Fantasy in Twilight, Edward Robert Hughes ca. 1911. Via Wikimedia Commons.

You may recall that several weeks ago, I shared an essay about Sandro Botticelli, whose contributions to art were nearly written out of the history books. Though his rediscovery was a slow-moving process, the Pre-Raphaelites played a major role in elevating Botticelli in the canon. Botticelli is exactly the kind of Quattrocento artist whom the Pre-Raphaelites adored: his sumptuously-detailed paintings and dramatic use of color appealed to their sensibilities.

Overseas, a new style was taking hold in France. This was the Realism movement, which endeavored to move away from Romanticism and instead portray the world of the mid-19th century exactly as it was—the good, the bad, and the ugly. When writing about the French Realist Gustave Courbet for The Spectator, the writer William Michael Rossetti observed that Courbet holds “a position somewhat analogous to that of the Praeraphaelites in England”—except in France, Realism depicted “the roughest of the rough,” and in England, “the most exquisite of the elaborated.”²

This scrupulous attention to detail comes across in Millais’s Ophelia. One way in which the Pre-Raphaelites broke with tradition was in their rendering of a painting’s background. The subject (Ophelia) is treated with the same importance as the plants that surround her; this was achieved by organizing the composition into small squares and finishing each section before moving onto the next, “rather than following the outlines of the represented forms.”³ To Millais, the whole was not greater than the sum of its parts.

Christ in the House of His Parents, John Everett Millais ca. 1850. Via Wikimedia Commons.

John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic and author of the Modern Painters series (the first volume was published in 1843), argued that these contemporary artistic movements were grounded in their “truth-to-nature”:

…the old masters attempted the representation of only one among the thousands of their systems of scenery, and were altogether false in the little they attempted; while we can find records of modern art of every form or phenomenon of the heaven from the highest film that glorifies the aether to the wildest vapour that darkens the dust, and in all these records, we find the most clear language and close thought, firm words and true message, unstinted fullness and unfailing faith.⁴

Ruskin was, as you can see, a passionate advocate for the artists of his time. To say that the old masters were “false in the little they attempted” is deeply unfair. However, the Pre-Raphaelites can be credited with stretching the possibilities of storytelling in art with “unfailing faith”—which, as in the case of Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (1850), could stir up quite a bit of controversy.

The Pre-Raphaelites brought to life everything from Shakespeare’s plays and Arthurian legends to Greek gods and English fairies. In this patron series, we will delve into a selection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings that possess a particularly literary bent, and come to recognize the language of magic and mystery imbued in their work.

Furthermore, the impact of their work extends beyond art: just as the Pre-Raphaelites seamlessly blended art with literature, the style they pioneered would in turn have a profound impact on the visual aesthetics of the fantasy genre. The next time you find yourself reading a story of knights and queens, fairies and fate, close your eyes and ask yourself who painted the images in your mind. You may find the art in this series unexpectedly familiar.

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Related essays from The Crossroads Gazette:

How the World Almost Forgot Botticelli

Arthur Rackham: Illustrating Dreams

1. William Shakespeare, Hamlet in The Norton Shakespeare: Third Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), 4.4.165-181.

2. Elizabeth Prettejohn, “Art,” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 199.

3. Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton University Press, 2000), 156.

4. Prettejohn, “Art,” 200.