The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood

Margarita G.

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The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood

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Lecture
Résumé
Sommaire
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Résumé du document

A considerable number of women were active in every phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Some, as was the case for Elizabeth Siddal and Lucy Madox Brown, incorporated the ideas of their husbands and fathers into their own art. Others were deeply influenced by the freshness of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, by the resourceful, pious and naturalistic vision of its members and followers. At the same time, the condition of Victorian women was more than ambiguous – women had no right to vote but could open their own commerce, were published and read, and their daughters would soon know Margaret Fuller. However, what characterizes the period is a particular dichotomy of virtue and vice – that ambivalent tension residing in the conflict between the prototypes of the “perfect woman” and the “seductive siren” – and the corresponding birth of feminine self-awareness. Throughout the Victorian age and well into the first decades of the 20th century, there is this continual effort to find the nature of femininity, to reflect upon the mystery of woman and to redefine her role in the modern world. The study of the attempts of women-painters to represent themselves, or rather to depict the very concept of femininity, is therefore all the more fascinating.

Sommaire

Introduction.
Sophie Anderson and Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale: Of children and virgins.
1. Waterfalls.
2. The composition of the painting.
3. A painting of a miniature woman.
4. The Wise and Foolish Virgins by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale.
5. Strongly reminiscent of the work of Burne Jones.
6. the place of a woman in such a painting.
Lucy Maddox brown and Annie Louise Swynnerton: the woman rebel.
1. The apinting Margaret Roper Rescuing the Head of Her Father.
2. The structure of the painting.
3. The traditional image of womanhood.
4. Joan of Arc.
5. An image of woman that is both real and surreal.
Evelyn de Morgan and Kate Elizabeth Bunce: woman as a myth.
1. The structure of Evelyn de Morgan's Hope in the Prison of Despair.
2. The first possibility for interpretation of the painting.
3. Studying the aspect of the two figures.
4. Kate Elizabeth Bunce's Melody.
Bibliography.

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Extraits

[...] They remain realistic and mystifying, realistic because they seem to accept their changing status with resolution and hope, mystifying because of that unaffected melancholy with which they accept their fate and which is present in their gaze. They are painted in their everyday contexts, in a garden, at church. These are contexts which become worlds apart. But there have been cases in both history and mythology when women got out of the space allotted to them, when they transgressed the borders that have been fixed to them. Many of them belong to history and a few have become myths. [...]

[...] The serene atmosphere of the autumn garden with its apple trees clearly parallels the Garden of Eden and its Tree of Knowledge; the fallen apples the girl has gathered and the distant fence are indicative of an acquiring of knowledge and of a crossing of the threshold between childhood and adulthood. As many Pre-Raphaelite works, the painting tells a story, it contains the past, the present and the future. It is also a scene of life and symbolic death representing the death of childhood. [...]

[...] Such women, when represented in painting, are involved in a troubled social and political context. The essence of womanhood is indivisibly connected with a woman's role in the world, where the acquisition of an awareness of her femininity is placed on a secondary level. Such is the case for some of the women painted by Lucy Madox Brown and Annie Louise Swynnerton. lucy madox brown and annie louise swynnerton: the woman rebel Born in Paris, Lucy Madox Brown was the eldest of Ford Madox Brown's three surviving children. [...]

[...] The background represents a garden or, most probably, a clearing in a wood. In the upper right-hand corner there is a wooden fence that runs from left to right across most of the painting (App. Fig. 1). The warm autumn colours, the careful handling of light to portray the girl's face and hair, the meticulously traced details of the child's dress, and the accuracy with which her basket is painted give the whole a typically Pre-Raphaelite harmony. Colours parallel each other; from the blushing face of the girl, the viewer's eye is directed to the red apples, scattered here and there on the ground, and is brought back to the girl again. [...]

[...] The rainbow is a recurrent device used by many Pre-Raphaelite artists. It is difficult to tell what Swynnerton's influences might have been but it is evident that she uses that particular symbol in connection with spirituality, with the invisible gate that is opened before the inner eye of a woman who is to become a saint. The rainbow as a manifestation of another world facilitates the transition from the material world to the spiritual one. Joan of Arc, with her eyes closed is able to that other world and to immerse herself in its light. [...]

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