Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-m8qmq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T09:18:34.325Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

PRE-RAPHAELITISM, SCIENCE, AND THE ARTS IN THE GERM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2015

John Holmes
John Holmes*
Affiliation:
University of Reading
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In her landmark study, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, Elizabeth Prettejohn identifies “the burgeoning Victorian interest in the sciences” as one of Pre-Raphaelite art's “most important contemporary contexts” (251). Many critics have seen the at times remorseless detail of early Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry as analogous to science. As Tim Barringer puts it, “The attention which hard-edged Pre-Raphaelite naturalism of the 1850s paid to observing the individual object encapsulates [science's] questioning, empirical spirit” (16). A major exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting in London, Berlin, and Madrid in 2004 to 2005 paid close attention to geology, meteorology, and natural history (Staley et al.). There have been a growing number of studies of specific aspects of the relationship between Pre-Raphaelitism and science, with individual chapters or articles published on Pre-Raphaelitism and phrenology (Grilli), physiognomy (Hartley 80–109) and ethnography (Pointon), and on specific painters, including John Everett Millais (Codell) and John Brett (Payne 104–23). Through this work, recent critics have begun to rediscover the relationship between Pre-Raphaelitism and science which Victorian critics favourable to the movement saw as fundamental to it (see also Rosenfeld). Writing in the Fortnightly Review in 1867, Sidney Colvin remarked that “the scientific spirit, coupled with the disgust of earnest men at academic pretensions and their reaction from academic principles, constituted the very essence of præ-Raphaelitism” (470–71).

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 689 - 703
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Barnes, Joanna, and Kader, Alexander. “The Sculpture of John Lucas Tupper: ‘The Extremest Edge of P.R.Bism’.” Pre-Raphaelite Sculpture: Nature and Imagination in British Sculpture 1848–1914. Ed. Read, Benedict and Barnes, Joanna. London: Lund Humphries, 1991. 66–70.Google Scholar
Barringer, Tim. The Pre-Raphaelites: Reading the Image. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson (Everyman Art Library), 1998.Google Scholar
Blair, Kirstie. Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Codell, Julie F. “Empiricism, Naturalism and Science in Millais's Paintings.” John Everett Millais: Beyond the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Ed. Mancoff, Debra N.. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001. 119–47.Google Scholar
Colvin, Sidney. “English Painters and Painting in 1867.” Fortnightly Review N.S. 2 (1867): 464–76.Google Scholar
Coombs, James H., et al, eds. A Pre-Raphaelite Friendship: The Correspondence of William Holman Hunt and John Lucas Tupper. Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1986.Google Scholar
Daubeny, Charles. An Introduction to the Atomic Theory. London: Murray, 1831.Google Scholar
Daubeny, Charles. An Introduction to the Atomic Theory. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1850.Google Scholar
Demoor, Marysa. “In the Beginning, There Was The Germ: The Pre-Raphaelites and ‘Little Magazines’.” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume 1: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955. Ed. Brooker, Peter and Thacker, Andrew. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 51–65.Google Scholar
The Germ: Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art. London: Elliot Stock, 1901.Google Scholar
Grilli, Stephanie. “Pre-Raphaelitism and Phrenology.” Pre-Raphaelite Papers. Ed. Parris, Leslie. London: Tate, 1984. 44–60.Google Scholar
Hartley, Lucy. Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Herschel, John Frederick William. A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. 1831. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holland, Henry. “Article II—Modern Chemistry.” Quarterly Review 83 (1848): 37–70.Google Scholar
Hunt, Robert. “On the Applications of Science to the Fine and Useful Arts: The Geometrical Principles of Beauty.” Art-Journal (Nov. 1850): 357–59.Google Scholar
Hunt, William Holman. “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: A Fight for Art.” Contemporary Review 49 (1886): 471–88, 737–50, 820–33.Google Scholar
Hunt, William Holman. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1905.Google Scholar
Jacobi, Carol. William Holman Hunt: Painter, Painting, Paint. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Alice. Space and the “March of Mind”: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815–1850. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kapoor, Sushma. “John L. Tupper, to 1863: ‘King of the Cadaverals’.” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 4.2 (1984): 70–86.Google Scholar
Kapoor, Sushma. “John Lucas Tupper, 1865–79: The Rise of ‘Outis’.” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 6.2 (1986): 37–44.Google Scholar
Knight, David. “Romanticism and the Sciences.” Romanticism and the Sciences. Ed. Cunningham, Andrew and Jardine, Nicholas. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 13–24.Google Scholar
Landow, George P. “An Annotated Checklist of J. L. Tupper's Works.” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 7.1 (1986): 63–68Google Scholar
Leithead, William. Electricity; Its Nature, Operation, and Importance in the Phenomena of the Universe. London: Longman, 1837.Google Scholar
Leslie, C. R.Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, Esq. R.A. London: Longman, 1845.Google Scholar
Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology. Ed. Secord, James A.. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997.Google Scholar
Merrill, Lynn L.The Romance of Victorian Natural History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Orchard, John. Letter to William Michael Rossetti. Bodleian Library. MS Facs. d. 278, fol. 77.Google Scholar
Payne, Christiana. John Brett: Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter. New Haven: Yale UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Phillips, John. A Guide to Geology. London: Longman, 1834.Google Scholar
Phillips, John. A Guide to Geology. 4th ed. London: Longman, 1854.Google Scholar
Pointon, Marcia. “The Artist as Ethnographer: Holman Hunt and the Holy Land.” Pre-Raphaelites Re-viewed. Ed. Pointon, Marcia. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989. 22–44.Google Scholar
Prettejohn, Elizabeth. The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites. London: Tate, 2000.Google Scholar
Rosenfeld, Jason M. “New Languages of Nature in Victorian England: The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, Natural History and Modern Architecture in the 1850s.” Diss.: New York University, 1999.Google Scholar
Rossetti, William Michael. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family-Letters with a Memoir. 2 vols. London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895.Google Scholar
Rossetti, William Michael. “Introduction”. The Germ: Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art. London: Elliot Stock, 1901.Google Scholar
Rossetti, William Michael. The P.R.B. Journal: William Michael Rossetti's Diary of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 1849–1853. Ed. Fredeman, William E.. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rossetti, William Michael. “Pre-Raphaelitism.” Spectator 24 (1851): 955–57.Google Scholar
Ruskin, John. The Art of England. Orpington: Allen, 1884.Google Scholar
Smith, Jonathan. Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Spinozzi, Paola, and Bizzotto, Elisa. The Germ: Origins and Progenies of Pre-Raphaelite Interart Aesthetics. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Staley, Allen, et al.Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature. London: Tate, 2004.Google Scholar
Stauffer, Andrew M. “The Germ.” The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites. Ed. Prettejohn, Elizabeth. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. 76–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stephens, Frederic George. “The Two Pre-Raphaelitisms.” Crayon 3 (1856): 225–28, 289–92, 321–24, 353–56; 4 (1857): 261–65, 298–302, 325–29, 361–63.Google Scholar
Tate, Gregory. The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830–1870. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Teukolsky, Rachel. The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Tupper, Jack. “Extracts from the Diary of an Artist.” Crayon 2 (1855): 159–60, 271–72, 319–21, 336–37, 368–69, 400–01; 3 (1856): 43–45, 75–76, 102–05, 234–36; 4 (1857): 103–07, 145–49, 200–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Werner, Marcia, Pre-Raphaelite Painting and Nineteenth-Century Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Willoughby, L. A.Dante Gabriel Rossetti and German Literature. London: Oxford UP, 1912.Google Scholar
Woolner, Amy. Thomas Woolner, R.A. Sculptor and Poet: His Life in Letters. London: Chapman and Hall, 1917.Google Scholar
Yeo, Richard. “An Idol of the Market-Place: Baconianism in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” History of Science 23 (1985): 251–98. Rpt. Science in the Public Sphere: Natural Knowledge in British Culture 1800–1860. Richard Yeo. Aldershot: Ashgate (Ashgate Variorum), 2001.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed