Inspiration and Emulation: Photography in the Pre Raphaelite Era

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The Pre-Raphaelite Lens

Diane Waggoner et al.

The introduction of photography in 1834 exerted a strong influence on the Pre-Raphaelite art movement, which originated in 1848. In turn, Victorian photography emulated the developments occurring in Pre-Raphaelite painting as well as the ‘high art’ of old master paintings. The Victorian photographers’ attempts to emulate painting were to some extent driven by their desire to raise the status of photography within fine art. This was, for example, the express intention of Roger Fenton (previously trained as an artist) in The Photographic Society, which he was instrumental in founding.

Indeed, influential voices within the Brotherhood, as well as the wider art establishment, believed photography to be an inferior medium. The critic, John Ruskin, for instance, believed painting to be superior on account of its labour-intensive process, which he described as akin to magic in its ability to reveal something of its creator, noting that Turner’s paintings contained ‘more of nature’ than photography could ever hope to achieve.

The Pre-Raphaelites sought to convey values of truth and realism in their work and for this purpose they drew on the art of the period that had preceded Raphael. While these artists generally did not publicly acknowledge a debt to photography, the book suggests ways in which this influence is clear. For example, it is apparent in the detailed copying from nature in many early Pre-Raphaelite narrative paintings with literary sources, such as the brilliantlycoloured Ferdinand Lured by Ariel  (1849–50) by John Everett Millais and  Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus  (1850–1) by Hunt.

In turn, photographers such as Oscar GustaveRejlander, Henry Peach Robinson and Juliet Margaret Cameron sought to convey the narrative realism of Pre-Raphaelite paintings by choosing similar and overlapping themes from literature, particularly Shakespeare and Tennyson, and from mediaeval mythology.

Ironically, while photography’s capacity to imitate reality was immediately recognized, photographers such as Benjamin Brecknell Turner, Henry White and Roger Fentonadopted conventional standards of the picturesque, which the Pre-Raphaelite painters largely scorned in their preference for radical modes of representation that sought to convey truth. The painters’ definition of truth was more specific to human perception than a literal transcription of reality. In this sense, painting, not photography, was the more ‘realist’ medium.

The painters’ concern with veracity radically challenged the social as well as artistic hierarchy of Classical art, instilled in the English Academy through Sir Joshua Reynolds. As well as their outdoor, close studies of nature – a practice in opposition to the Academic, studio-based tradition of copying from sculpture and the nude, the Pre-Raphaelites broke with pictorial hierarchies, such as foreground figures that dominate background landscape, by giving each part of the image equal prominence within the plane. They also shunned the predilection for portraits of aristocratic or military figures, preferring to depict their friends, largely drawn from the artistic and literary elite.

By the 1860s photography was established as the medium for objective truth and concurrently Pre-Raphaelite painting moved away from its preoccupation with realism to more stylistic and subjective concerns more typical of the later movement,Aestheticism.

This shift can be observed in the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In contrast to his earlier watercolour  Blue Closet  (1857), which sought to capture the pure truth of mediaevalmanuscripts, his later oil painting,  Fair Rosamund  (1861) features the headshot of an allegorical goddess-like figure, which draws on Venetian Renaissance painting.

In featuring tightly cropped headshots, Rossetti’s later works also show the influence of photography. This cropping technique is also present in several earlier Pre-Raphaelite paintings of nature, including John Ruskin’s  Rocks and Ferns in a Wood at Crossmount, Perthshire  (1847), and John William Inchbold’s  Mid-spring  (1856), which employ a photographic means of representation in cutting out the treetops.

Rossetti’s later Venetian style was in turn influential to photographer Cameron, who after 1864 produced close-up headshots of beautiful women, such as  The Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty  (1866) and  Marie Spartali  (1868). Cameron’s work became increasingly distinct during the 1860s and the book discusses the ways she transcends emulation to create a specific role for photography as a fine art medium.

The five scholarly essays in this lavishly illustrated book are the first attempt to thoroughly explore the cross-pollination that occurred between the two mediums of painting and photography. This approach is overdue and significant given the mainstream recognition of photography as a fine art medium for the last few decades.  While the book provides a comprehensive account of the mutual influence of the two mediums, its restricted remit means there is some repetition of points made from one essay to another. This focus mainly serves, however, to give photography the scrutiny more commonly devoted to other art forms and brings out the unique contribution this medium has made to the history of art.

The Pre Raphaelite Lens  by Diane Waggoner, Tim Barringer, Jennifer L. Roberts, Joanne Lukitsh, and Britt Salvesen is published by the National Gallery of Art (Washington, USA) in association with Lund Humphries (Surrey, UK), 2010. 230pp. 198 colour and 3 mono illus. ISBN: 9781 848220676