Zomer 2005 no. 53
De latere leden:
The Dutch Dickensian Volume XXV
over dit schilderij het volgende:
"You behold the interior of a carpenter's shop. In the
foreground of that carpenter's shop is a hidious, wry-
necked, blubbering, red-haired boy in a nightgown,
who appears to have recieved a poke playing in an
adjecent gutter, and to be holding it up for the
contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible in
her ugliness that (supposing it were possible for any
human creature to excistfor a moment with that
dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest
of the company as a monster in the vilest cabaret in
France or in the lowest gin-shop in England"6.
Hoe oprecht Dickens in zijn kritiek was is echter
nog maar de vraag. Op de de site van het
Victoriaweb staat dat hij zo uit zijn slof schoot
nadat de Pre-Raphaelieten kritiek op zijn vriend
Tom Taylor, de kunstcriticus van de Times hadden
geuit.
William Morris (1834-1896)
Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98)
Ford Madox Brown (1821-93)
John Ruskin (1819-1900)
Walter Deverell (1827-1854)
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)
Op de tentoonstelling van 1851 was het weer raak.
Ditmaal schrijft hij een brief naar de Times7 om
zijn ongenoegen over de schilderijen te uiten. Ook
zijn latere schoonzoon Charles Collins die
inmiddels qua stijl in de richting van de
broederschap was geëvolueerd krijgt ervan langs:
"We cannot censure at present as amply or as
strongly as we desire to do, that strange disorder of
the mind or the eyes which continues to rage with
unabated absurdity among a class of juvenile artists
who style themselves P.R.B., which, being
interpreted, means Pre-Raphael-brethren.
Their faith seems to consist in an absolute
contempt for perspective and the known laws
of light and shade, an aversion to beauty in
every shape, and a singular devotion to the
minute accidents of their subjects, including,
or rather seeking out, every excess of
sharpness and deformity. Mr. Millais, Mr.
Hunt, Mr. Collins - and in some degree - Mr.
Brown, Madox Brown] the author of a
huge picture of Chaucer, have undertaken to
reform the art on these principles.
In the North Room will be found, too, Mr.
Millais' picture of 'The Woodman's
Daughter', from some verses by Mr. Coventry
Patmore, and as the same remarks will apply to the
pictures of the same artist, 'The Return of the Dove
to the Ark' (651and Tennyson's 'Mariana' (561
as well as to similar works by Mr. Collins, as
'Convent Thoughts' (493), and to Mr. Hunt's
'Valentine receiving Proteus' (59), [Valentine
Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus] we shall venture to
express our opinion on them all in this place. These
young artists have unfortunately become notorious
by addicting themselves to an antiquated style and
an affected simplicity in painting, which is to
genuine art what the medieval ballads and designs
in Punch are to Chaucer and Giotto.
With the utmost readiness to humour even the
caprices of Art when they bear the stamp of
originality and genius, we can extend no toleration
to a mere servile imitation of the cramped style, false
perspective, and crude colour of remote antiquity.
We do not want to see what Fuseli termed drapery
'snapped instead of folded', faces bloated into
apoplexy or extenuated to skeletons, colour
borrowed from the jars in a druggist's shop, and
expression forced into caricature.
It is said that the gentlemen have the power to do
better things, and we are referred in proof of their
handicraft to the mistaken skill with which they
have transferred to canvas the hay which lined the
lofts in Noah's Ark, [Millais' 'The Return of the Dove
to the Ark'], the brown leaves of the coppice where
Sylvia strayed, Hunt's 'Valentine Rescuing Sylvia
from Proteus', from Shakespeare's play 'Two
Gentlemen of Verona'] and the prim vegetables of a
monastic garden, Charles Collins' 'Convent
Thoughts']. But we must doubt a capacity of which
we have seen so little proof, and if any such capacity
did ever exist in them, we fear that it has already
been overlaid by mannerism and conceit. To become
great in art, it has been said that a painter must
6 Hilton biz. 52.
7 Times 7 mei 1851
3 0
u'A
