Art’s silenced sisters finally take centre stage
Pre-raphaelite Sisters
National Portrait Gallery ★★★★★
Picture a Pre-raphaelite painting. Dollars to doughnuts it’s a woman with flaming copper hair, pillowy lips and a faraway look in her eyes that glides into your mind. We know the look of these “stunners” – as William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais referred to their models – arguably better than any other women in art history. As temptresses and heroines, they animate some of the 19th-century Brotherhood’s most acclaimed works of art.
There are plenty such paintings to gaze at in Pre-raphaelite Sisters, an addictive retelling of the movement, in which its coterie of women – there are 12 of them – take centre stage, rather than the walk-on parts they have historically been allotted.
It is a fascinating story, scraping away a century of whitewash, and told with zest. To say curator Jan Marsh knows her stuff would be a gross understatement. These “silenced sisters” have been the object of her study since the Eighties, and she has poured thought and inspiration into this chance to bring them to life.
Far from passive mannequins and lovers, each woman is revealed to be a far more significant player and a profoundly more interesting personality than has been previously realised. For one, the criss-cross of connections between the women is riveting. Their lives interlace in bafflingly intricate and often poignant fashion. Some were friends, some sisters-in-law, some rivals in love, some modelled for each other’s paintings. They dined together, holidayed together, put up with each other, encouraged each other.
Naturally, the exhibition cannot help but be a quasi-biography of the Pre-raphaelite movement as a whole, a group of artists that formed in 1848, bound by their admiration for Italian art before the time of Michelangelo, and who sought to put paid to the post-renaissance tradition embodied by their bête noire, Joshua Reynolds. They held sway, in various iterations, until about 1900.
Rather than opting for a chronological presentation that would have relayed the Brotherhood’s rise and fall, each woman has been given her own dedicated space in which to unfurl – and in fine detail.
Evelyn De Morgan was a keen spiritualist, for example, and Marie Stillman embroidered her own shoes. Fanny Cornforth, who sat for Burnejones and Rossetti, ended her days in the Sussex county asylum. The page in the patient register that records her 1907 admission, penniless and suffering from dementia – which came to light only four years ago – is included in the exhibition.
Several of the women – De Morgan (wife of ceramicist William), Marie Spartali Stillman (modelled for Ford Madox Brown), Georgiana Burnejones (wife of Edward), Maria Zambaco (modelled for Burne-jones and Rossetti), Joanna Boyce Wells (wife of Henry Tanworth Wells) – were artists in their own right, though have received little recognition. Others became linchpins of their husband or lover’s artistic production, engaging sitters, designing costumes and cultivating patrons. Effie Gray Millais, for instance, single handedly persuaded a wealthy banker to commission a portrait of his daughter, even negotiating its £2,000 fee.
Sometimes, it is through the minutiae that these women’s characters best come to life: a letter from Jane Morris describing how she felt about her daughter’s epilepsy; a casual photograph of Spartali Stillman with her son on her lap.
Most haunting is probably the navy silk, slashed-sleeve dress that Boyce Wells wore for the portrait that her husband painted of her in the 1850s. It sits, encased, next to her sketching palette and opposite her two beautiful portraits of her children, in which no brushstroke is heedlessly placed. “I have talents or a talent and with it the constant impulse to employ it,” she wrote, in 1857, “not for notoriety or fame, but for the love of it and the longing to work.” She died in childbirth just a few years later.
Do we emerge from the show knowing these women entirely? Not quite, but well done to Marsh for allowing these stories, long neglected by history, to be heard.
Until Jan 26. Tickets 020 7321 6600; npg.org.uk