Having waited a few years for Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery to open its doors again to the public after the long drawn-out COVID period, followed by seemingly endless maintenance work, I was eager to see the exhibition
Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement on display in part of the main site; Gas Hall. Assembled together were pieces that drew attention to the unique role played by circles of artists from the 'city of a thousand trades', Birmingham, faced with an increasingly industrialized society that drove mass production to meet growing material demand. Beautiful jewellery, glass, textiles and metalwork were displayed next to some of the drawings and paintings that I have known most of my life and therefore seeing them again here felt like meeting old acquaintances.
I used to love pouring over the tiny, painstaking details of the great Pre-Raphaelite works with their jewel-like colours that light up some symbolic meaning or other. The bright, clear colours that illuminate each detail of the specific theme illustrated are still mesmerising to me, even if the latter can sometimes appear rather laboured or simply lost on me. Indeed, in their earnest desire to reject the heavy, pedantic Classicist style and subject matter advocated by the Royal Academy, the Pre-Raphaelite 'brotherhood', turned back to Arthurian legends, Greek mythology and tales of Medieval courtly love, many of which are in no way familiar to us today. But even when young, I found the expressive eyes and hands particularly captivating, whatever the narrative of the work in question and was pleased to realise that I am still drawn to these, all those years on.
Musica (1895-7) by Kate Elisabeth Bunce (1856-1927) was used to advertise this 2024 exhibition and seeing it again felt like revisiting the past. Of course, the painting is lavishly detailed, all in vivid enamel-bright colours as it invites you to peer into its depths, just as its convex mirror pulls you forward, whilst the intricacy of the tapestry-like clothing ensnares you. The musician stares out, engaging and yet somehow managing to maintain a strange air of elusiveness
Elongated, tapering fingers, with their graceful and/or dramatic gesture was characteristic of many Pre-Raphaelite paintings and typically appeared in the work of Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898)... Above is a detail of the
Pygmalion series (1875-78) that was recounted in Ovid's
Metamorphoses but was retold by William Morris in his epic poem,
The Earthly Paradise (1868). In this, the third painting of the series -
The Godhead Fires - the goddess Venus brings Pygmalion's, Galatea, to life. Below, we see the two lovers brought together in the final painting;
The Soul Attains . Although their hands entwine, there is no direct exchange of looks as she looks enigmatically into the distance rather than meeting his gaze.
Likewise, expressive hands and enigmatic or overted eyes are often a key point in the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). The fact that the 1881 work
The Lady of Pity (
La Donna della Finestra) was never completed emphasises the aesthetic focus even more. Rossetti was fascinated by the poetry of the Medieval Italian, Dante Alighieri, and identified with his obsessive love and subsequent mourning for Beatrix; object of his unrequited love and subject of his infactuation in
La Vita Nuova (1295).
In the unfinished work, commenced the year before Rossetti's death, the oblique expression of the woman's eyes escapes us, gazing out beyond. Her hands, with their impossibly long and languid fingers seem to assume a life of their own. Although the model for the painting - Jane Morris - indeed had distinctive hands, Rossetti used artistic licence to draw further attention to them. This approach was certainly not, however, unique to this particular piece but was recurrent in much of Rossetti's work.
The only exception to this perhaps is
Beata Beatrix, begun in 1877, which represents Dante's love, Beatrix, as she slides into an ecstatic trance-like state at the moment of death, with her eyes closed, hands upturned with the palms passively exposed.The posthumous model for Beatrix was Elisabeth Siddal, who was also the model in John Everett Millais'
Ophelia from 1851. More importantly Lizzie - referred to as 'The Dove' - was Rossetti's late wife, having died of a laudanum overdose in 1862. The poppy symbolising eternal sleep, carried by the dove in the painting thus takes on greater significance and Beatrix/Lizzie's death underpins Rossetti's identification with Dante.
Beatrix's hands appear to be a faithful rendition of those of Lizzie, fairly short-fingered yet able to express emotion without the extremes more characteristic of Rossetti's work. Looking at the Millais work, I think you can even see the likeness with the hands of Rossetti's Beatrix. It seems ironic that Elisabeth Siddal should be famous for modelling tragically young women from literary works shown on the brink of death when she herself died at a mere 32 years of age.
The Keepsake (1901), again by Kate Elisabeth Bunce, illustrates a staple Pre-Raphaelite theme; Medieval chivalry and courtly love. Here, it is drawn from a scene in one of Rossetti's poems,
The Staff and the Scrip, written in the mid-19th century. Whilst the details of the painting are exquisite, the whole does not quite pull together so that the final result is like a set of beautifully-crafted, yet loose patchwork pieces. It is almost as if the artist lost herself in the intricacies, so consumed was she by capturing their beauty. Therefore in this work, the eloquence of the hands and downturned glance of the ladies-in-waiting who bring the pilgrim's belongings to the queen, caught my eyes before anything else and certainly more so than the key figure of the queen with her strangely vacant expression.
In
The Last of England (1852-5) by Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893), the oblique stares of the husband and wife reveal far less than their anguished hands as the leave their homeland to emigrate to Australia. The woman's gloved hand clenches the purple-knuckled hand of her husband in the inclement weather conditions that bear down on them as they turn their back on England. She compresses his fingers in a tight, nervous grip whilst her other hand gently holds the tiny hand of the small child concealed under her shawl.
But for the beauty of expression, the most stunning rendering of the human gaze has to be
The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1860) by William Holman Hunt (1827-1910). Himself of great Christian faith, Hunt wished to paint religious scenes in their true settings and therefore travelled to the Middle East to do so.
The Finding of the Saviour represented Jesus with the Rabbis in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, but unable to find individuals willing to model for the work, Hunt was obliged to approach members of the Jewish community once back in London. The eyes and facial expressions he finally painted are just breath-taking...
