The Pre-Raphaelite lens: British photography and painting, 1848-1875

Abstract

"Every movement has its genesis, as every flower its seed; the seed of the flower of Pre-Raphaeli[ti]sm was photography. ---William Bell Scott" "As photography steadily gained a foothold in the 1840S, a group of British painters calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelites came of age. Answering John Ruskin's call to study nature, "rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing," these young painters were also spurred on by the possibilities of the new medium (introduced in 1839), particularly its ability to capture every nuance, every detail. And yet, the Pre-Raphaelites' debt to photography has barely been acknowledged." "From photography, painters learned to see anew: adapting such radical qualities as abrupt cropping, planar recession, and a lack of modulation between forms, painters made their art modern, sometimes shockingly so. Photographers in turn looked to Pre-Raphaelite visual strategies and subject matter---mined from literature, history, religion---"to secure," as Julia Margaret Cameron wrote, "the character and uses of High Art." These artists developed a shared vocabulary---featuring light and minute detail as an emblem of visual truth---which helped launch realism as the century's dominant visual mode. "Exactness," a critic affirmed in 1856, "is the tendency of the age."" "This volume explores the rich dialogue between photography and painting through the themes of landscape, portraiture, literary and historical narratives, and modern-life subjects. These artists---from photographers Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, Henry Peach Robinson, and Oscar Gustave Rejlander, to such painters as John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John William Inchbold---not only had much in common, but also upended traditional approaches to making pictures."--BOOK JACKET.

Contents

Introduction Uncompromising Truth: Photography and Pre-Raphaelitism / Diane Waggoner -- An Antidote to Mechanical Poison: John Ruskin, Photography, and Early Pre-Raphaelite Painting / Tim Barringer -- Plates 1 - 27. Minute Details -- "Certain Dark Rays of the Sunbeam": Sunlight and the Decomposition of Landscape / Jennifer L. Roberts -- Plates 28 - 49. Natural Effects -- From the Life: Portraiture in the 1860s / Diane Waggoner -- Plates 50 - 74. Portraits and Studies -- "Like a Lionardo": Exchanges between Julia Margaret Cameron and the Rossetti Brothers / Joanne Lukitsh -- Plates 75 - 103. Poetic Subjects -- Show and Tell: Narrative in Victorian Art / Britt Salvesen -- Plates 104 - 125. Romance and Modern Life.