The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape by Allen Staley. Second Edition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001.

The first time I saw slides of English Victorian painting in a graduate art history class, I knew that I wanted to study Pre-Raphaelite art. The bright colors and meticulous details differed profoundly from what I had seen of the 19th century as an undergraduate and were to my eyes beautiful. Since then I have come to see emblems of “truth to nature” in these English paintings, while retaining a sense of the beauty offered up in carefully rendered greenery. There is reason to say that today nature-related and Pre-Raphaelite painting is experiencing avid scholarly interest. The attention to landscape found in PART and a “new” book about Pre-Raphaelitism suggests this. Elsewhere Véronique Chagnon-Burke and I implicated nature in the 1990s revival of beauty in art and design [1]. We noticed that beauty took the form of nature most often in terms of the physical environment, but also the human figure. During its day beauty was frequently identified with the female figure in Pre-Raphaelite painting. Could the recent tendency in beauty offer insight into their engagement with the natural world?

Allen Staley’s lavishly illustrated book is a fitting testament to both topics. First published in 1973 by Oxford University Press, the book grew out of Staley’s dissertation at Yale during the 1960s, itself a time of renewed interest in things Pre-Raphaelite (hereafter PR). The author intended to illuminate the largely unknown area of landscape painting undertaken by the PR Brotherhood and followers during the 1850s and 1860s together with their stance toward “the natural world”. As a group the Brotherhood spanned the years from 1848 to roughly 1853, centering around the painters, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It also included the painters, James Collinson and Frederick George Stevens; Thomas Woolner, sculptor; and art critic, William Michael Rossetti. Of these Hunt and Millais are linked with outdoor painting.

Staley’s study helped change the thinking about John Ruskin’s role in the origins of PR naturalism, setting the pace for what is now synonymous with the history of Pre-Raphaelitism in general. Early histories underplay Ruskin’s influence; one reason being that the painters incorporated a new realism prior to their 1851 meeting with the renown critic. Staley emphasizes the significance of Ruskin’s ideas through his writings, which began well before his advocacy and patronage. Ruskin’s most germane work, Volumes I (1843) and II (1846) of Modern Painters, advocated the direct study of the motif and close attention to finish and natural details.

Besides rejecting inherited techniques and styles in favor of close observation and description, Ruskin’s approach differed from previous English theorists, because it insisted upon specific versus general detail. The precise delineation of a tree branch or leaf, for example, especially in the immediate foreground, violated the conventions that taught artists to blur these objects or leave them in shade. While citing Hunt’s own words of enthusiasm for the second volume of Modern Painters, whose focus is early Italian painting, the first volume according to Staley was the most influential. This book strove through the example of Turner to elevate landscape painting’s status, ending with the now famous advice to young artists:

…[They should] go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remembering her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing…[2].

The second edition resembles Staley’s first book in the above. It also assumes the same historical posture drawing on contemporary exhibition catalogs, art criticism and other written accounts in an effort to discuss artists, their ideas and works, in relation to Ruskin when possible. In this way Staley maps out a trajectory of PR landscape painting, locating it in the context of nineteenth-century developments in landscape in England and France. After chapters about the background of the PR Movement and Ruskin’s ideas, the book is organized largely around individual artists, beginning with the example of Ford Maddox Brown as an influential associate of the Brotherhood, followed by core members of the group, Hunt and Millais. In light of recent scholarship chapters are devoted to related artists: Thomas Seddon, George Price Boyce, John William Inchbold , John Brett and William Dyce.

Methodologically speaking the information and pictures are so rich they tend to obscure the lack of new interpretational strategies. The only homage to the new art history admittedly treats the work of women artists in a chapter entitled “Some Friends and Followers”, among them, Anna Blunden, Rosa Brett and Barbara Bodichon. With the ground set by Staley and subsequent scholars, an interdisciplinary approach would be informative. Through a study of artists and styles, Staley examined PR landscape and related painting during the 1850s and 1860s in conjunction with attitudes toward nature.

But the Pre-Raphaelites and associates were more than painters and describers of landscape. They embraced the area of design, writing and nature as a whole. Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne immediately come to mind. From painting to wall paper to furnishings to poetry their work teams with references to flowers, plants, water, gardens, and the seasons. Even when Hunt and Millais painted outdoor scenes, they seemed more inclined to depict abundant natural imagery than landscapes per se. For this reason developments in garden planning, interior design, poetry, literature, fashion, and the culture of flowers become worthy of note. Scholars of English literature have long observed a similarity between Victorian poetry and PR painting and verse through the “aesthetics of the particular” [3]. I would add nature’s particulars to the equation. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is representative:

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieces – fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim… [4]

Against the grain, this book contributes to the understanding of landscape painting as an expression of modern art, specifically “progressive” English painting, to borrow Staley’s words [5]. For Staley these landscape paintings and PR art in the main relate to Post Impressionist compositions through the “richly articulated two-dimensional patterns which stay on the surface of the canvas” [6]. By taking cues from nature instead of art, he regards the work as extremely modern, with which I agree. But the lack of respect for tradition had a downside. Too stylistically radical to catch hold, the paintings failed to establish a new school of English art . Nonetheless the subject of landscape in tandem with English painting and PR art, largely outside the discourse of modern art history, receives a welcome nudge in Staley’s book.

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