Desperate Romantics [DVD] [2009]

Desperate for what? For attention, recognition, publicity, fame, glory. Desperate to challenge authority, cause waves, be taken seriously. Desperate to take on convention and orthodoxy via new visions of beauty in women and nature. For this they issued a manifesto in the form of their brotherhood, founded in 1848, which henceforth set out to change the way art interpreted the world.The main players are well known. Those in the initial brotherhood: Gabriel Dante Rossetti (1828-82), John Everett Millais (1829-96) and William Holman Hunt (1827-1910). Eminent critic: John Ruskin (1819-1900). Casual critic: Charles Dickens (1812-70). Later brotherhood members: William Morris (1834-96) and Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98). A fictional character, sympathetic journalist of the brotherhood, Fred Walters. Finally, the all-important women in the brotherhood circle (models, lovers, muses): Lizzie Siddal (1829-62), Effie Gray (1828-97) and Annie Miller (1835-1925). In truth, in history, the circle became much wider, including other artists and poets, but this series keeps things simple and minimal, focusing mainly on the people mentioned above.What drove them? Passion, energy, inspiration, ambition. In 1848 they were all very young, Hunt the only adult among them at age 21, Rossetti just 20 and Millais still a teenager. They were too young to be realistic and daunted. They were charged with heroic ideas about art. Determined to take on the world, they did. But they were also shrewd and knew they couldn’t do it alone. They needed patrons and allies and found the greatest of these in one person — John Ruskin, the most eminent art critic of his day. His power and influence would be crucial. They knew it, needed it, courted it, procured it. After all, it was Ruskin who had championed J.M.W. Turner when others of the time saw nothing exemplary in his works. Blurred lines, mists and steam, amorphous shapes and shadows. Nothing solid, nothing to hang onto. But that was precisely it, Turner’s intent, the elemental uncertainty of everything, the ephemeral nature of reality. Both Turner and Ruskin saw the future.In a way, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood can be seen as a continuation of Turner’s explorations. The style is different, yet the ways of depicting nature are not. There is a dreaminess, an exaggerated sensuality in their women and the surroundings that highlight their beauty. The women are both real and apparitional forms, too angelic, too beautiful for this world. The Pre-Raphaelites exalted their feelings in their works, not holding back for the sake of propriety. Passion was their deal. In the stuffy Victorian England of their day they were radicals and rebels, and they delighted in their reputation. They were the indie rockers of their day.The series is written in this spirit, tongue-in-cheek with copious in-jokes. Quite a few ‘B’ words dominate: bars, brothels, bedrooms, bohemian bed-sits. At first they were poor, as in short of cash, their quarters cramped and cluttered, their clothes scruffy and tattered. They were cocky and rakish, full of themselves, ordaining themselves geniuses before any works of theirs had proclaimed this to be true. But it didn’t matter. The gold they had was self-belief and the brotherhood. These three musketeers were ready to conquer the world.But they needed special women to fulfil their artistic dreams, those possessed of ethereal beauty. The first of these we see is Lizzie Siddal, a shop girl in a hat shop in London. She was 19 in 1848 and had a full head of long, beautiful bright red hair. Fred Walters, a journalist friend of the brotherhood, is the one who spots her. He’s shopping with his mother one day when he spies Lizzie. Shortly thereafter he brings news of this discovery to the brotherhood. As soon as he sees her Gabriel Rossetti is smitten, besotted, overwhelmed. He must have her. She must sit and model for him. She simply must. They must move heaven and earth to procure her.In his finest duds (flamboyant but shabby) Gabriel meets Lizzie’s parents, accompanied by Fred. Gabriel, usually theatrical and self-regarding, is on his best behaviour, charming Lizzie and her family. Her father is stern, her mother worried. Our Lizzie is to sit unaccompanied in a garret in London for you? Wearing what? Furthermore, doing what? How long does the sitter sit before the mind starts to wander?They are right to be concerned. Lizzie’s family is loving and protective. They may be working class, but class has nothing to do with love. They feel slightly honoured to know their daughter is the object of adulation and celebration, but, naturally enough, she could also become the object of desire. Her life (and theirs) is thus double-edged this way. As the brotherhood rises in the firmament, Lizzie’s star does too. But fame brings an unstable and dangerous world with it, one with added pressures, expectations, conflicts. Her lot will take her from simple model to muse, lover and wife. She’ll even become a painter and poet as well, a mirror image of Gabriel. Even so, drugs, excess, dissipation and disappointment will have their say too.William Hunt and John Millais likewise find female muses. Hunt’s find is pretty straightforward. Annie Miller (also a redhead) is a Cockney barmaid in the local London tavern the brotherhood frequent. She’s a flirt and may ‘entertain’ male customers now and then, the line between propriety and its opposite thin with her. Hunt is captivated. Not only does he convince her to sit for him, he wishes to make a lady of her too, paying for her education and elocution lessons. Thus for him she becomes model, muse, lover and social experiment.The route of Millais toward finding his muse is very different. In fact, it was engineered by John Ruskin. Ruskin may be a great thinker and writer on the arts. He is refined, highly educated and intelligent, a pure aesthete, a lover of ideal and abstract beauty. But his social skills, particularly among women, are almost non-existent. Effie Gray was a young admirer of Ruskin. Her family was also friendly with Ruskin’s. Thus their marriage was more or less arranged. There was a courtship and engagement, but these were very formal. Ruskin remained restrained throughout. No matter in Effie’s mind. Her husband-to-be was a great man from whom many great things would flow, including love. But how wrong she was. After marriage little flowed from Ruskin apart from coldness, condescension and invective. Was he one of those who can only love women in the ideal, in some celestial sphere of the imagination? Seems so. The actual woman, the one of flesh and blood, was repellent to him. At least Effie was. In five years of marriage he had never properly touched and loved her. Naturally, she is utterly miserable.Ruskin may have been the patron of the entire brotherhood, but he valued Millais highest. It was Ruskin’s idea that Effie sit for Millais. This would serve two purposes, raising the spirit of Effie and giving Millais a beautiful and interesting subject to paint. Millais, like Ruskin, was somewhat restrained. It seems clear (or at least is made clear in this series) that Millais had no carnal desire for Effie. At least not initially. But the situation was apt to encourage it, Effie posing for him day after day, and sometimes with her bare white shoulders exposed.Inevitably, Effie falls for Millais and he for her. However, a major obstacle to marriage exists. What to do about her current marriage? Divorce was scandalous and difficult. Annulment, though also difficult, would be easier. On what grounds? On those of her husband’s inability to consummate the marriage. How could this be proved? Through medical examination. This is done. Thus it’s confirmed that Effie is still a virgin, annulment duly granted. Millais is inexperienced too, it turns out. At least the series says so. This lends comic value to the proceedings as the awkward and self-conscious lovers eventually fumble their way toward rapture.The series is actually redeemed by its occasional humour. It prevents us from taking it too seriously, even though tragedies such as Ruskin’s dysfunctional personality and Lizzie’s physical decline punctuate the drama. Gabriel is often seen as a comical figure too, a rakish womaniser with high ideals but low tolerance for carnal abstinence. Matrimony with Lizzie has not reformed him. Nothing, perhaps, can. However, the sex scenes with him and whomever are among the funniest in the series, a man enthralled but compromised and chastised by his desires. There flat on his back he groans on the bed, his mouth wide open, his eyes bulging, a fish out of water gasping for air. The effect? Ridiculous buffoon.Thank goodness. The production demystifies these great painters. They are made human by their appetites, petty rivalries, insecurities, jealousies. Gabriel’s ego never diminishes, made plain by a comical and ironic scene at the tail end of the series. It has to do with his poetry and what he did to preserve it, an act that speaks volumes about his character as a man — what he valued and why.Some critics, professional and otherwise, have dismissed the series by saying it’s too over-the-top with its lewd and bawdy revelries. Fine, their opinion. But only an opinion. Mine is different. Without such raunchiness the story would be falsified, prettified. They were artists, not saints. Their world was chaotic and grubby, not always beautiful: messy garrets, drunken quarrels, bouts of doubt, inspiration, vision.The series is cool and edgy for a reason, containing contemporary values and elements. Thus it’s no great stretch to think they lived like rock stars. The passion is there in the paintings because it was there in the lives.Some have said the women in the paintings are fascinating but not beautiful. This might be true for some. It applies to other women as well, those painted by other artists. Is Mona Lisa beautiful? How about Vermeer’s girl with the pearl earring? If not beautiful, they are fascinating. And if not that, why have I (and countless others) wanted to kiss the wet lips of Vermeer’s girl so often? Even now she sometimes gazes out at me from my desktop screen, her 17th century smile immaculately preserved.In the end, what better tribute to an eccentric band of painters than an eccentric film about them? Made in the spirit of these painters, this series is a triumph.

This book came into my hands as a direct link to the Poldark series. I was looking at youtube and found this BBC drama from 2009 via Aidan Turner (Ross in Poldark). It is about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, their lives and deeds in 19th century England. I had never heard about this group, but as is usual, once you hear about something it pops up everywhere. I downloaded the book and found a fantastic, real life story of passion, love, fanatism and a quest for the perfect painting.The group consisted of seven English painters, poets and critics who formed the initial "brotherhood", and the aim was to reform the art. They did not agree with the teachings of academic art at the time, and wanted to go back to older ways of painting, where much more detail was shown, the colours were more intense and more complex compositions from the Quattrocento Italian art.This biography follows them all, but are mostly concentrated on the three, very talented founders William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. They were joined by William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner.Franny Moyle starts her story when all of them are struggling to be acknowledged, although painting in a different way from the norm. They often used the same models, and the models themselves became famous and integrated parts of their lives, for good and for worse. Their motto seemed to have been 'this day is the last'. As they get older and establish themselves, their interests are developing in different ways, and they split. Rossetti, who seemed the most diabolic of them, starts a second group with new upcoming artists. They are all like a big family, and relationships start and end, at regular intervals. Apart from Millais who settles down when he marries Effie Grey and live a family life, the others are restless souls, who never seem to find their peace.One of the most famous critics at the time is John Ruskin. He is a very important part of the group's lives, in more ways then one. He is a very peculiar person, highly intelligent and a patron of the arts. He takes the Pre-Raphaelite painters under his wings. We follow his troubled marriage to Effie Gray, who finally divorces him and marries John Everett Millais.There are a lot of fantastic characters in this book, and they all come from real life. Franny Moyle has managed to vitalise them into, what I can imagine they were, highly passionate, dedicated painters. It seems that the painting was what kept them alive, sometimes on behalf of personal relations. It was, as if they could not separate their paintings from their lives. A highly interesting book about a set of characters that made a stir and a scandal in Victorian England.Cannot wait to see the BBC drama. In a future post I will tell you more about my visit to Tate Britain to see some of their paintings, and other literary references to this fascinating group.