Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movementWood, Esther (of Hampstead)
Philosophy
Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement
Wood, Esther (of Hampstead)
Pre-Raphaelitism -- Great Britain; Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1828-1882
Cave Thomas, who so infelicitously christened “The Germ,” had gained a
prize in the Westminster Cartoon competition, and was the painter of one
very beautiful picture, “The Protestant Lady,” exhibited in the Academy,
and greatly admired by the Brotherhood. He published in 1860 a monograph
entitled “Pre-Raphaelitism Tested by the Principles of Christianity;”
and subsequently became art professor to the Princess of Wales.
Mr. Frederick Sandys was not personally known to the leading Pre-
Raphaelites until 1857, and was by that time too original and
accomplished an artist to be claimed by them as a disciple, but his work
was for some time intimately associated with theirs. He was to the last
a valued friend of Rossetti, who always affirmed that while in
draughtsmanship he had no superior in English art, his imaginative
endowment was of the richest and rarest kind.
Mr. Henry Wallis is justly remembered by his one great picture, “The
Death of Chatterton,” which touched popular feeling as its true pathos
and dignity deserved to do, and won universal praise.
Mark Anthony is rightly regarded by the Pre-Raphaelites as the most
poetic of their landscape painters. His grandly simple and reposeful
“Old Churchyard” will compare even with Millais’s “Vale of Rest,” and
his “Nature’s Mirror” with Mr. Burne-Jones’s “Mirror of Venus” in later
years. Mr. John Brett, now famous in seascape, was for some time
intimate with the Brotherhood; and among friends and sympathizers on a
similar footing may be mentioned Val Prinsep, Thomas Seddon, J.D.
Watson, J.F. Lewes, W.S. Burton, Spencer Stanhope, M.F. Halliday, James
Campbell, J.M. Carrick, Thomas Morten, Edward Lear, William Davis, W.P.
Boyce, J.W. Inchbold, and, by no means least, John Hancock, a young
sculptor who won an Art Union prize in 1848 with a bas-relief of
“Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem.” He was a friend and fellow-worker with
Woolner, and fell so far (with Rossetti) under the fascination of the
Dante legends as to accomplish a very fine statue of “Beatrice” in or
about 1852. One other artist of the first rank in his generation remains
to be named,—Frederick Shields, an intimate and warmly-loved friend of
Rossetti, cherished by him in close and unbroken companionship even to
the hour of death; and in point of critical estimate pronounced by him
to be one of the greatest of living draughtsmen, taking rank with Sir
Frederick Leighton, Sir Noel Paton, and Mr. Sandys.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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