The Pre-Raphaelites: Visions, Arthurian Legends and Spiritualism
From Rossetti's Beata Beatrix to Burne-Jones's Beguiling of Merlin and Evelyn De Morgan's spiritualism: magic in Pre-Raphaelite painting.
In 1848 three young students of the Royal Academy, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in London. They wanted to return to the sincerity of painting before Raphael, against the academic conventions of their day. Within a few decades the movement turned into something different: a painting of dream, legend and symbol, in which magic and the supernatural hold a central place.
Rossetti and the woman as vision
Son of the Italian exile Gabriele Rossetti, a Dante scholar, Dante Gabriel grew up among the pages of the Vita Nuova, which he translated into English. After the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal in 1862 he painted Beata Beatrix, now at Tate: the woman, eyes closed, is rapt in a kind of ecstasy while a red bird drops a white poppy into her lap. In the background Dante and Love can be glimpsed, and a sundial marks the hour of death.
Between 1866 and 1868 Rossetti also painted Lady Lilith, inspired by the legendary first wife of Adam in Jewish tradition, who combs her golden hair before a mirror. In his mature painting the female figure becomes an ambiguous presence, halfway between the spiritual muse and the creature able to enchant and ruin a man.
Merlin, Morgan and the Arthurian legends
A second generation, gathered around Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, looked to the cycle of King Arthur and to medieval romances. The most famous example is Burne-Jones's The Beguiling of Merlin, exhibited in 1877 at the Grosvenor Gallery and now at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight: the lady Nimue, wrapped in a sinuous gown, reads from a book of spells while the wizard, inert, is imprisoned in a hawthorn tree.
Frederick Sandys, for his part, painted Morgan le Fay beside the loom on which she prepares an enchanted cloak, and other painters of the circle repeatedly returned to ladies, fairies and bewitched knights. Their sources were Thomas Malory, Alfred Tennyson and medieval poems, read as a repertoire of visions rather than as history, in an England enthusiastically rediscovering its legendary past.
Evelyn De Morgan and spiritualism
More explicit was the interest of Evelyn De Morgan, trained at the Slade School and niece of the painter John Roddam Spencer Stanhope. With her husband, the potter William De Morgan, she devoted herself to spiritualism and automatic writing, a practice then widespread in Victorian drawing rooms, and in 1909 the couple anonymously published a volume of the messages they believed they had received. In her paintings, such as The Love Potion of 1903, sorceresses, angels and souls journeying towards the light appear.
Her canvases translate into images a spiritual vision made of struggle between light and matter, of the imprisonment and liberation of the soul. In this sense Evelyn De Morgan represents the point at which the Pre-Raphaelite tradition directly meets the spiritualist currents of the late nineteenth century, which in London counted many followers among artists, writers and scientists.
The path of the Pre-Raphaelites, from the meticulous realism of their beginnings to the visions of the fin de siècle, shows how Victorian England, at the height of the industrial revolution, sought in art a refuge made of legends and enchantments. Their images influenced European Symbolism and, through illustration, the fantastic imagination of the twentieth century, down to cinema and children's books.