NGA blockbuster 'Love and Desire' worth a visit, but 'a little predictable'

Love and Desire: Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces from the Tate. National Gallery of Australia. Until April 28, 2019.

The ‘Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’, or PRB as they preferred to enigmatically call themselves, was a juvenile group of seven male Victorian artists; illustrators and designers who banded together in 1848 in opposition to what they perceived as the artificial and trivial pursuits at the Royal Academy.

The painters in the group were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens. They were joined by the sculptor Thomas Woolner and by Dante Gabriel’s brother, William Michael Rossetti, who worked as secretary to the group.

In various manifestations, the PRB lasted until the turn of the century, by which time their modernised version of the Middle Ages and literary fiction, fundamentalist Christianity and somewhat simplified ideas on socialism and modern society had attracted widespread popular acclaim and had permeated into many cultural pursuits.

Praise for the PRB was far from universal and already by 1851, the foremost writer in England, Charles Dickens, described the work of Millais as “the lowest depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive and revolting”. Twentieth century modernist critics almost unanimously condemned the Pre-Raphaelites as the epitome of what they wanted to overthrow in the name of modern art.

R.H. Wilenski, painter and prominent champion of modernism, in a memorable turn of phrase described Millais as “fundamentally philistine – commonplace, conceited, and sentimental”. Nevertheless, the most articulate art critic in the English language of the Victorian era, John Ruskin, championed the PRB, especially for their heightened naturalism, which was part of his truth to Nature as a path to truth to God agenda.

The exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia consists of about 100 works, mainly paintings and drawings, by artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. It would be inaccurate to describe this exhibition as coming from the Tate, as fewer than half of the exhibits are from the Tate, with many borrowed from other collections, particularly the Manchester Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of South Australia and a private art collection in Melbourne. While factually it may be true to say that two of the iconic images in this show, Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia, 1851–52 and John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott, 1888, before may not have left the Tate together for the same venue, they are very well travelled paintings that are frequently out of the gallery on loan.

Millais’ Ophelia is smaller in the flesh than one imagines from exposure through countless reproductions. The style, in a different era, could be described as ‘hyper-realist’, where the 22-year-old artist laboured at great length to preserve with botanical exactitude the brush at Hogsmill River at Ewell in Surrey.

Breaking with academic practice, Millais painted outside, from the object, and not from studies made in situ but assembled in the studio. The figure of Shakespeare’s Ophelia was subsequently plopped into the composition at a later date, in his studio in Gower Street in London. The model, 19-year-old Elizabeth Siddal (subsequently Rossetti’s wife and a talented painter in her own right), was forced to lie for weeks on end in a bath full of water, warmed by lamps from below, dressed in a heavy embroidered dress, which Millais boasted cost him four pounds “old and dirty as it is”.

Ophelia (Siddal) caught the most famous cold in British art history when she suffered a severe chill as the lamps went out under the bath. Her father threatened the artist with legal action unless he paid the doctor’s bills. The saga had a happy ending; the painting was finished, Millais paid the bill, and Siddal continued to pose for the PRB. The melodramatic painting, steeped in floral symbolism and illustrating the well-known narrative from Hamlet, became a favourite with amateur botanists and general gallery visitors.

Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott, 1888 illustrates the ending of Lord Tennyson’s eponymous famous poem of about half a century earlier. In a silly tangled tale drawn from Arthurian myth, the Lady of Shalott, guided by a crucifix on her boat, breaks the moorings and sails into the sunset to her needless death, indicated by the three candles before her – two of which have already been extinguished. There is a great degree of realism in the painting of objects, bright colours and, as with Ophelia, a generous serve of sentimentalism.

A highlight of the exhibition, at least for me, is Ford Madox Brown’s painting Work, 1865, which exists in two versions. We are seeing the larger, slightly later painting from the Manchester Art Gallery, rather than the smaller and, I think, less accomplished version in Birmingham.

Looking back to the moral allegories of Hogarth, Brown presents a cross-section of British Victorian society and the transition occurring in the face of the Industrial Revolution. Set in the recognisable location of The Mount on Heath Street in Hampstead, a group of ‘‘navvies’’ is digging up part of the road for a new sewerage and drainage system as a sign of progress. All of society, including the leisured classes, pauses to witness the work of the labourers.

Brown, who left copious notes on the interpretation of Work, also played out the class struggle with a canine commentary. In the lower centre is a mongrel dog, which Brown describes as a “rugged democrat”. To the left is a brown dog wearing a sweater – the wealthier upper-middle class of the society – a sworn enemy of the first dog, which, as Brown writes, “hates minions of aristocracy in red jackets”. There is also a sleeping bulldog pup, a companion of one of the labourers, which is protected by the mongrel dog, and in the upper centre of the painting is a hunting dog, a symbol of the upper-classes, who have time to go hunting. Tucked away in the background is a dog yapping at a carriage, hinting that social discord is just around the corner.

Other works that stand out in this exhibition include Rossetti’s The Annunciation, 1849-50, Millais’ The rescue, 1855, Brown’s The last of England, 1864-66, Burne-Jones’ Perseus and Andromeda, 1876, Burne-Jones’ Fortitude, c.1898, Hunt’s (with Frederic George Stephens) The Light of the World, 1851-56, Arthur Hughes’ La belle dame sans merci, 1863 and Rossetti’s The beloved, 1865-66/73.

People who love the Pre-Raphaelites will find this a must-see exhibition full of little surprises and unexpected inclusions with major works by minor painters. Personally, I found the literary, illustrative and sentimental nature of much of the work a little predictable and the sugar content in some of the narratives a bit high for my taste.

Love and Desire is an exhibition that is certainly worth a visit, but while at the gallery, do pop in and see in the Australian section cameo exhibitions of Australian Impressionism, Art Deco and Art Nouveau, and the beautiful California Cool show upstairs in the Orde Poynton Gallery.