Aoki Shigeru and the Pre-Raphaelites

The Meiji period Western-style artist Aoki Shigeru（1882-1911） was influenced by Western arts. He saw western pictures from the books which were borrowed from the library in Ueno, Tokyo Art School, and friends of poets. Among them, especially, many scholars have noted the similarities between the composition of Aoki and the Pre-Raphaelites. This article analyzes the influence of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood on Aoki’s paintings and states why Aoki especially chosen Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in much Western arts.東アジアの言語と表

My Ladys Soul : The Successes of Elizabeth Siddal & Jane Morris, & the Rise of the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood

This thesis demonstrates that Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris, two muses of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, used their creative talent, writing, and direct and indirect actions to combat the Victorian notions held by the Brotherhood and inspire other female artists. The Brotherhood was begun in England in 1848, with aspiring artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman-Hunt, John Everett Millais, and four others redirecting their output against the teachings of the British Royal Academy. Rather than upholding the High Renaissance artist Raphael as the ultimate painter and role model, Rossetti and his cohorts set out to prove the Academy wrong, basing their art on what came before Raphael, using ballads, poems, murals, and more as a source of inspiration. Despite receiving praise for paintings like Ophelia (1852) and Bocca Baciata (1859), the men conformed to the patriarchal society of their day, presenting beautiful faces that were impassive and in need of rescue. This same dynamic came to life within the Brotherhood’s studios, with their models being considered damsels in distress while the male artists donned the role of knight in shining armor. Initially models to Rossetti, Holman-Hunt, and Millais, Siddal and Morris took it upon themselves to break out of the mold of Victorian muse through paint, pen, and needle. This thesis contends that Siddal and Morris demonstrated their own agency through their art and words, recruiting other women within their community to create the PreRaphaelite Sisterhood. In drawings like The Lady of Shalott (1853) and poems like “True Love,” Siddal would insert a female-driven narrative into the Pre-Raphaelite sphere while Morris, in presenting embroideries like The Homestead and the Forest quilt (1890) and private letters, would circumvent the idea that only the Brotherhood could be artistically successful. Overall, both women redefined themselves and what it meant to be a Pre-Raphaelite

Imagining intimacy : rhetoric, love and the loss of Raphael.

This article looks at the problem of historical narrative painting in terms of the idealisation of Raphaelesque conventions. It deals with the neglected “Raphaelitism” that Pre-Raphaelitism claimed to reject, seeking to articulate what is termed here an aesthetic of intimacy in contrast to the alienating surface complexity of Pre-Raphaelite art. The aesthetic of intimacy downplays pictorial surface but plays on the ideal of the penetration of surface itself as a revelation of the form of truth to which art gestures. O’Neil’s paintings use the model of Raphael’s pictorial “softness” in order to develop a pictorial strategy in which the viewer is encouraged to attend to the subtle variations of body language. The article appeared in a themed issue of Visual Culture in Britain that was edited by Barlow himself. It is part of the same broad project as Barlow’s monograph, Time present and time past: The Art of John Everett Millais, namely the re-examination of models of “progressive” art by exploring ways in which artists formerly deemed to be “academic” were engaging in complex ways with the problems of representation and tradition. Barlow’s Introduction and the issue as a whole addresses the question of modernity in relation to the conceptualisation of history painting. In this instance, however, the intent is to examine the problem further by looking at an artist who specifically positioned himself as an enemy of stylistic innovation

Ekphrastic Portrait of Pre-Raphaelite Models

[EN] The thesis “Ekphrastic Portrait of Pre-Raphaelite Models” aims to juxtapose two seemingly separate subjects of ekphrasis and Pre-Raphaelite models. Ekphrasis, originally a literary term for a rhetorical device, reaches times of antiquity. However, over the course of time, it underwent the process of changes and started to refer not only to painting-poetry translations but it also expanded to interrelations between disciplines such as prose, film, theater, music, and photography. Ekphrasis, as the form of imitation achieved through different means of representation, should be seen through the differences and similarities offered by words and images. Among artists who incorporated ekphrasis in their art was the nineteenth-century Brotherhood of the Pre-Raphaelites inspired by works of Dante, William Shakespeare, and Lord Alfred Tennyson

‘Young while the Earth is old | and, subtly of herself contemplative’: investigating the influence of Pre-Raphaelitism on Neo-Victorian visions of femininity

It is rare to find a Neo-Victorian text which does not reference the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Through character archetypes, aesthetics and book design, the Pre-Raphaelite arts provide a referent for authors to signify Neo-Victorian culture. However, much recent criticism of Pre-Raphaelitism centres around the assumption that the feminine aesthetics of the movement are always ‘the gorgeously fetishised object of a desiring gaze’ (Tickner, 2003). While this is partly true, it is also a reductive method for reading the breadth of Pre-Raphaelite culture. This thesis examines how Neo-Victorianism centres and unites femininity with creativity, placing women at the centre of artist narratives. It argues that Neo-Victorian Pre-Raphaelitism offers an alternative vision of the movement and its members, co-opting the Victorian mode to re-centre Pre-Raphaelite womanhood

Christina Rossetti: Pre-Raphaelite poet

Considered by her contemporaries to be one of Victorian England\u27s greatest poets, the writings of Christina Rossetti clearly exemplify the work of a Pre-Raphaelite artist ( CR and the Visual Arts ). The publication in 1862 of Goblin Market and Other Poems represented the first literary success of the Pre-Raphaelites, although Christina herself was not a bona fide member ( CR\u27s Literary Career ). Much speculation exists as to the reason that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Several biographers/critics postulate that some of the members refused to allow her admittance because she was female; however, an actual letter from Gabriel suggests that she was asked, but declined, in his words, because she felt it would some type of display, I believe—a sort of thing she abhors (Marsh 83)

The influence of British literature upon pre-Raphaelite painting

It has been the object of the writer, in preparing this thesis, to emphasize the influence of British literature upon the Pre-Rapheelite Brotherhood of painters who lived and worked during the reign of Queen Victoria. It is the hope of the writer to show, in treating these artists who revived the truthfulness of nature as applied to painting, that those who were realists were also idealists, and that those who were romanticists were yet realists in the broader sense of the term, for realism may interpret the larger elements of imagination. With due recognition of her limited ability, the author desires to dispel what to her seem several narrowly critical edicts pronounced against the Brotherhood by various students of art, thereby freeing the Brotherhood from a maze of confusing isms and placing them on a humanized plane of appreciation as highly inspirational artists. Perhaps the most important contribution of the Pre- Raphaelites lies in the fact that they nationalized British art and at the same time gave it individuality by introducing into it for the first time subjects from British literature. It is furthermore the desire of the writer to emphasize the position of William Morris not as an adjunct of the Pre-Raphaelite group, but as a conciliatory figure who united the two factions of the Brotherhood, the realistic and the romantic, into a harmonious group of individualists. Lastly, as interesting sidelights upon the Pre-Raphaelites, the author wishes to present in the final chapter of this paper, a brief discussion of two themes relative to the main topic: the interrelationship of the Pre-Raphaelite painters and writers who formed a larger brotherhood, and the contribution which the Pre-Raphaelites have made to British art from foreign sources, As such material is not strictly in keeping with the subject of the work, it was thought advisable to reserve such digressive discourse for the final pages

Graceful Pre-Raphaelites and Pre-Raphaelite Grace : Victorian visual arts in Margaret Atwood’s "Alias Grace"

The visual imagery of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace might have as one o f its sources the “graceful” , hence popular, art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Grace’s beauty veils her emotional torment in the mode similar to the comely faces o f Pre-Raphaelite models: theirs are the faces disguising suffering and insanity. Moreover, during her confinement in the asylum Grace is even compared by one of the characters to the raging ophelia, a theme recurrent in the Victorian art. In her “psychoanalytic” sessions the servant reveals her obsession with the gothic image o f her dead mother drowning in the sea, metamorphosing into another woman, perhaps Mary whitney or Nancy Montgomery. In the dream vision of doctor Simon Jordan in turn, Grace overcomes the Ophelia-like death in water and lives on despite the difficult past. Consequently, Pre-Raphaelite paintings constitute another Victorian element in the novel’s dense texture, which has already been interpreted by the critics as the one involving Dickensian orphans and Coventry Patmore’s “angels in the house”

Pre-Raphaelitism and the professional ideal : art, criticism, and sexuality

This dissertation examines the professional ideal in relation to the development and transformation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood between the late 1840s and the 1880s. The first chapter examines how one might relate the recent theoretical work on nineteenth-century professionalism by Harold Perkin to the distinctive art practice of the Pre-Raphaelites. In chapter two, the discussion focuses on how the professional ideal was shaped by the development of a frequently hostile periodical press that insisted on seeing the Pre-Raphaelites as a distinctive group. The third chapter considers how the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood developed professional identities that diverged from the careers of those artists sponsored by the Royal Academy. The chapter looks in particular at the innovative exhibiting strategies that the Pre-Raphaelites undertook to market their work. Chapter Four compares how differently John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti responded to attacks on Pre-Raphaelitism, and how they were ultimately drawn to contrasting aspects of professionalism. Their divergent careers reveal a major tension between entrepreneurial and professional ideals in the art market. The final chapter examines the 'fleshly school' controversy that surrounded Rossetti and the early Aesthetes of the 1870s. This concluding study reveals how Rossetti's contentious representation of sexual subject-matter played a crucial role in the consolidation of the professional ideal