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God is in the details: Tate Britain's exhibition on the Pre-Raphaelite approach to nature is ambitious in its intellectual scope
Apollo, April, 2004 by Michael Hall
Tate Britain's first major Pre-Raphaelite exhibition since 1984 is a challenging as well as a richly rewarding experience. Its examination of the way the Pre-Raphaelites depicted the natural world is based on the firm foundation of Allen Staley's The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, first published in 1973 and reissued in a new edition in 2001. Professor Staley has curated the exhibition with Christopher Newall (working with Alison Smith, Ian Warrell and Tim Batchelor of Tate Britain); by striving to suggest an intellectual and historical setting for the paintings and drawings on display, the exhibition aspires in some ways to the approach of that book. Yet, for all its undoubted successes, it reveals at several points that the fit between the contextualising approach of so much contemporary art history and the object-based curatorship of museum practice is far from snug.
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Hung against walls painted in an appropriate palette of rich, mid-Victorian looking colours, the paintings look happy in Tate Britain's Linbury Galleries. The relatively low proportions of these rooms, which can be unsympathetic for bravura art, work well with paintings that are rarely big, and invite the closest of scrutiny. Yet by the final room, the exhibition feels much larger than its one hundred and fifty one works because the act of looking at so many of them is exhausting. The scrupulously accurate depiction of nature that the Pre-Raphaelites encouraged is demanding in itself, and it is striking how many of the painters challenged viewers yet further with an almost subversive refusal to provide the cues of conventional composition. Tight cropping and unexpected angles, added to a frequent use of hard, even lighting, often make it difficult for the eye to take in a painting, reinforcing a frequent denial of the relationship between 'important' subject or motif and 'unimportant' detail. Here, God is definitely in the details.
This is an exhibition of highly stimulating art, and its greatest triumph is to provide fresh evidence of the brilliant unconventionality of these artists' work in the late 1840s and 1850s. It also makes it clear that there was remarkable strength in depth. The great names--Millais, Brown and Holman Hunt in particular--seem as strong as ever, but the work of artists specialising in landscape is no less impressive: J.W. Inchbold and John Brett are in many ways the stars of the show. Less well known names shine--paintings by Joanna Boyce and Rosa Brett fully deserve the emphasis given to these remarkable women--and there are some revelatory discoveries. High among them is J.R. Spencer Stanhope's earliest surviving painting, Robins of modern times, which is here exhibited in public for the first time since 1860. The Stanhope scholar Simon Poe, whose article on the painting forms the basis of the catalogue entry, convincingly argues that this image, apparently showing a child sleeping in a benign landscape, is in fact a pair to the artist's depiction of a prostitute, Thoughts of the past (Tate), and depicts the aftermath of the violation that began her moral descent. It is a painting, therefore, of disturbing, almost Hardyesque subtlety: Stanhope seems to be contrasting the innocence of nature with the girl's fallen state, but, as Mr Poe points out, the robins who observe the girl were customary symbols of lasciviousness, and thus the painting may also be drawing a parallel between the amorality of nature and that of the girl and her unseen lover.
The exhibition and its catalogue are perhaps at their best in such thoughtful analyses of the moral implications of depictions of the natural world. More contentious is the way they seek to place the paintings in the context of mid-Victorian debates about science and religion. Under science it is possible to include photography, which is handled in an oddly tentative way. A dozen or so photographs are exhibited and it is clear that the audience is expected to draw parallels between the way photographers and painters approached nature. Although there is nothing wrong in inviting visitors to make up their own minds, I would have appreciated more of a steer from the curators. What was the relationship between photography and Pre-Raphaelite art? Apart from the example of Ruskin's encouragement of artists to use photography as a tool, no strong links are made. The rather fastidious decision to hang the photographs in groups away from the paintings only rein forces a sense that the photographic images--some of remarkable beauty--are marginal to the exhibition's concerns.
There is no such tentativeness, however, about the way the exhibition sets painting in the context of the study of geology, the pre-eminent science of the age. A whole section, 'Understanding the landscape', is devoted to artists' knowledge of geology and an enthralling catalogue essay by Christopher Newall explores the subject in unprecedented depth--an exploration which is given added life by Mr Newall's accounts of visiting many of the landscapes these painters have depicted. His catalogue entry, on John Brett's The Glacier of Rosenlaui is a tour-de-force combination of art-historical and scientific knowledge with first hand experience. Yet this focus on geology means that other scientific aspects of these painters' work are not examined in the depth they merit. It would have been at least as interesting to be asked to compare the Pre-Raphaelites with botanical painting--after all, The Athenaeum in 1852 compared Millais's depiction of a waterlily in Ophelia with studies by Linnaeus.
