Pictorial Shakespeare, 1880-1890 - eTheses Repository - University ...

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all conventional circles. It was me:riced toy the
distinction of n serious and laborious ambition,
reposing on ideas which \vore new, and more or less
original. The minuteness of finish was a kind of
reproach to older and Ic-s careful artists, who
relied on swiftness of glance and "m; oterly"
rapidity oi' touch. Lastly Mr Llillais 1 earlier
works were informed with a sentiment, v/hich
puzzled people incapable of sentiment, and were
marked by a respect for the early Italian painters,
and for the religion and art of a time then
generally known as the "Dark Ages".11
Detail and minuteness of finish were seen as the expression of
a "literary 11 temperament when Holman Hunt exhibited The Triunr b.
of t'l.o Innocents in 1885: Hunt hr.d remained faithful to the
Brotherhood, ir. his fashion. Great ingenuity wrs dhov/n by the
artist, who represented the holy fpjnily fleeing Herod's edict,
accompanied on their journey by the spirits of the slaughtered
Innocents - happy and unusually well-developed infants. Strange
soap-bubbles float across the composition, bearing in then
reflections of the scene depicted. A critic in The Magazine
of Art objected to the recondite eyn^olisra, and the learning
displayed in the depiction of natural detail:
Vie expected a picture. v;iiat we found was... a
confused but earnest and honourable achievement
in literature, expressed in the most strenuous
tr.rr.is, .vith a patience, a Ir.boriousness, a determination
of symbolical intention worthy of all
respect*
(VIII (1085) xxii).
Conservative taste of the eighteen-fifties had reproached the
Brotherhood and its associates of overworked detr.il and neglect
of the cubliiae. The same arguments were being used in the
eighteen-ei^ ties against the French avant-garde. V>.Stephens
complained in 1885 of Hunt's new work:
The Virgin, who ougl. t to have been beautiful,
?'nd ir.ight have been young, is neither one nor
tho other, but simply a bold matroii of lo-rco
proportions anrt a pretentious air.
(The Portfolio y XVl"(l885) CO-2; p.82)»
i'v/o years earlier, the same journal carried on anonymous
review of !i tv:elve well-known French artir ts" exhibiting at
tiio Dudley Gallery. Amongst them w;is Rodin:
i'here is the nude, coloured plaster of ot.John
tho Baptist, nDJellcil by M.Ro-liii, ,vith cieriant