Victorian Surrealists

In 1848, London first saw the initials P.R.B. in the corners of paintings. The artists who put them there wanted no one to mistake their work for Raphael's. Nobody was likely to.

P.R.B. stood for the "PreRaphaelite Brotherhood." The original Brothers were three Englishmen out of joint with their early Victorian times: William Holman Hunt (21), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (20), John Everett Millais (19). They hoped to recapture the spiritual vigor and simplicity of 14th-and 15th-Century Italian art, and they desired to practice Ruskin's thesis--that esthetic reverence for nature must keep pace with scientific exploitation of her. Their enemies were two: the muddy-handed ghosts of Raphael--devotees of "The Grand Manner" --who were darkening the academies of England with fuzzy fifth carbons of the Master; and also the sooty-haired Samson of British industrialization, which threatened to flatten their walled gardens and blot out their bits of blue sky.

Factories and frock coats were in England to stay, but the young neo-medievalists would have none of either. Like the modern surrealists, they painted their dreams--the difference was that their dreams concerned the beautiful and good.

Last fortnight Harvard's Fogg Museum did them honor with the most comprehensive Pre-Raphaelite show ever seen in the U.S. A chalky procession of anemic heroes with torches, washed-out heroines with doves, empty-eyed angels with bubbles, and chubby babies with bouquets, the show seemed to modern eyes like the interminable (though carefully censored) maunderings of a none-too-bright schoolgirl. Harvard students found it dull as dishwater. The Handwriting on the Frame.

Harvard and the Pre-Raphaelites had never gotten along too well. Seventy years ago Harvard's eloquent art professor Charles Eliot Norton came back from vacations in England and talks with Ruskin to preach the Pre-Raphaelite gospel. His lectures were crowded because his courses were regarded as a cinch; Norton, in disgust at his lack of conversions, told his students that they were just "roughnecks." His enthusiasm for the P.R.B. boys, however, caught one young student, Grenville Lindall Winthrop, who was a wealthy retired lawyer when he died in 1943. Winthrop left his art collection (6,000 art objects, including the spate of Pre-Raphaelite dreamwork on display last week) to the Fogg.

Short, rotund Professor Paul Joseph Sachs, a present-day inheritor of Norton's mantle, considers the Fogg's Pre-Raphaelite possessions just as fascinating as they are vapid, but tells his students that they should be considered in relation to the literature of their day. No one could deny that Rossetti's sickly sweet Blessed Damozel (see cut) seemed a little better on reading his verses inscribed on the frame:

The blessed damozel leaned out From the gold bar of heaven; Her eyes were deeper than the depth Of waters stilled at even; She had three lilies in her hand, And the stars in her hair were seven.

Around her, lovers, newly met 'Mid deathless love's acclaims, Spoke evermore among themselves Their rapturous new names; And the souls mounting up to God Went by her like thin flames. Says Professor Sachs slyly: "Every generation is sure that its taste is impeccable."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.