306 APPROACHING THE PRE-RAPHAELITE WOMEN ARTISTS Lavinia Hulea, Assist. Prof., PhD, University of Petroșani Abstract: Towards the last decades of the twentieth century, art historians and critics showed an increased interest in the women artists affiliated to the Pre-Raphaelite group; various studies approached subjects focusing on the social and professional roles played by the Pre- Raphaelite women artists or on the model and painter Elizabeth Siddall. The Pre-Raphaelite group included an important number of women artists, who were either sisters or daughters of the Pre-Raphaelite men artists, or wives of artists and writers. Art historians have shown that it is not wrong to refer to the women artists that were part of the enlarged Pre-Raphaelite group as to the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood ; moreover, as far as the importance of their artistic production is concerned, the works that have been preserved are entitled to a critical reconsideration. Keywords: painting, Pre-Raphaelites, women artists, artistic training, artistic experience Between 1997 and 1998, the itinerant exhibition called Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists, organized by Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn and showed in Manchester, Birmingham, and Southampton, displayed an important collection of art works produced by the women artists, who were linked to the Pre-Raphaelite group. It has been stressed that the artistic achievements of the Pre-Raphaelite women painters have always seemed to be depreciated and considered inferior to those belonging to their male colleagues and to other important male artists. In order to give a positive and relevant perspective upon the importance of the Pre- Raphaelite women artists it is necessary to rely on the works signed by them; unfortunately, most of these works no more exist, due to various reasons: some of them were destroyed;
307 others were not attributed or were accredited mistakenly; part of them were impossible to locate, while others were only partly finished. The Pre-Raphaelite group included an important number of women artists, who were either sisters (Christina Rossetti, Rosa Brett, Emma Sandys, Joanna Boyce, Rebecca Solomon) or daughters (Lucy Madox Brown, Catherine Madox Brown) of the Pre-Raphaelite men artists, or wives of artists and writers (Elizabeth Siddall, who married Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Marie Spartali, who married the American artist and photographer William Stillman, Lucy Madox Brown, who married William Michael Rossetti). According to Elizabeth Prettejohn (2007, 71), citing Jan Marsh, it is not wrong to refer to the women artists that were part of the enlarged Pre-Raphaelite group as to the Pre- Raphaelite Sisterhood ; moreover, as far as the importance of their artistic production is concerned, the works that have been preserved are entitled to a reconsideration. Elizabeth Siddall approached the Pre-Raphaelite group at the end of 1849, as a model for several figures painted by Hunt, Deverell, and Millais; she was Viola, in Walter Deverell s Twelfth Night (1850), a red hair woman, in A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids by Hunt (1849-50), Sylvia, in Hunt s Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (1850-51), as well as Ophelia, painted by Millais (1851-2). She is said to have belonged either to the working class or to the lower middle class, but it seemed that she did not earn her existence as a professional model. She became involved with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and, by 1852, she was posing only for him and started learning to draw from him. They got married in 1860, but, unfortunately, two years later she died of an overdose of laudanum. Her work includes a series of drawings and water-colours that are considered to have set forth a new type of woman, who is stronger and bolder than the typology of early Pre-Raphaelitism and would dominate the later stage of the movement. The new woman figure is strong-necked, wavy-haired, and wide-eyed and has a more voluptuous counterpart in the
308 paintings belonging to the male painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 1. Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, Lady Clare, 1857, private collection The Pre-Raphaelite women artists are also considered to have approached group drawing activities as the members of the Brotherhood used to do. Among these women artists working together, Barbara Leigh Smith (Bodichon) and Anna Mary Howitt (Watts) were already leading personalities of the group, by 1850; they not only worked together, but also travelled abroad to study art, attempting at coming closer to the Brotherhood s devotion to art and discussing ideas about the emancipation of women. 2. Barbara Leigh Smith (Bodichon), At Ventnor, Isle of Wight, 1856, private collection By mid-century, William Michael Rossetti repeatedly expressed his opinion on the importance of taking into consideration the work of the women artists and, through his exhibition reviews and contributions to a series of magazines, he drew attention on Siddall, Howitt, Boyce and Smith. Theorists also assert the idea that the Pre-Raphaelites rejection of academic conventions represented a step towards women s emancipation, owing to the fact that they still could hardly benefit from academic education in art. It has been noticed that the women who
309 embraced Pre-Raphaelitism approached various types of artistic training and experience: they either studied in Munich (Howitt), in Paris (Boyce), or used to work in different styles. Nonetheless, they seemed to display a common objective in the rendering of women figures, from mid-century onwards (for instance, Howitt s Boadicea 1856, Boyce s Rowena Offering the Wassail Cup to Vortigern - 1856 or Siddall s Lady Clare - 1854-7), abandoning the usual graceful figure typology of the Victorian painting. 3. Anna Mary Howitt (Watts), Elizabeth Siddall, 1854, private collection Nowadays art historians have noticed that the previously mentioned manner of representing women, initiated by the Pre-Raphaelite women artists, resulted, during the 1860s, in paintings of single female portraits, showing imposing features, painted by both men artists (Dante Gabriel Rossetti s Bocca Baciata 1859, William Holman Hunt s Il Dolce Far Niente 1859-66, or John Everett Millais s Esther 1865) and women artists. The assertion differs from the one commonly supported by former authors, who considered that such portraits were exclusively made by the male Pre- Raphaelite artists, who presented women as temptresses. The new typology of women, made by the women artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, has been acknowledged as an attempt at representing forceful women meant to oppose to the ordinary Victorian taste for frail womanhood. (Prettejohn, 2007: 84)
310 4. Joanna Mary Boyce, Gretchen, 1861, Tate, London In spite of the small number of works preserved, of the lack of adjacent data, and of the marginal place commonly given to them by art history, the women artists connected with the Pre-Raphaelite men artists appear now as an important creative force exhibiting various training backgrounds, different personal experience or artistic practice. BIBLIOGRAPHY: 1. Marsh, J. 1987. Pre - Raphaelite Women. Guild Publishing, London. 2. Hilton, T. 1976. The Pre-Raphaelites. Thames & Hudson, London. 3. Moyle, F. 2009. Pre-Raphaelite Art: The Paintings that Obsessed the Victorians in The Daily Telegraph (Review), London. www.telegraph.co.uk. 4. Nead, L. 1988. Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. 5. Prettejohn, E. 2007, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites. Tate Publishing, London.