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

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the wrong effect in a room, where his eye required "a resting
place of pure colour" 2 . For the medicevalism that inspired
Morris's designs and politics the new movement substituted
an interest in classical, Renaissance amd Augustan art -
rediscovering the antique and its previous rediccoverers. These
periods were now interpreted as times of repose, idyllic
unconcern with great problems of state and ethics, and quasiaristocratic
ease: a view which has been exemplified above
from vVedmore's essays on genre painting. A new purity of line
and colour was being substituted for the achievement of midcentury
reformers.
At first sight the reaction against Pre-Raphaelitism that took
place in the late 'seventies and 'eighties appears to have
embraced again the views of those who spoke against the
novement at its inception. Tr. John Brown, one of the more
thoughtful opponents of the Brotherhood's methods, described
The Light of the ,/orld in 1862 in tanas suggestive of Later
reactions to The Triumph of the Innocent st
The faults of the picture as a work of art are,
like its virtues, those of its school - imitation
is sometimes mistaken for representation. There
is a want of unity, breadth and spaciousness
of nature about the landscape, as if the painter
had looked v/ith one eye shut, and thus lost the
stereoscopic effect of reality - the solidarity
of binocular vision; this gives a displeasing
flatness. It is too full of astonishing bits,
as if it had been looked at, as well as -v inted,
Brown evidently feels that the grandeur of the subject has
been forfeited to exactitude of detail - a Romantic idea of
the spiritual impact of nature lr< been lost in the v;ork of
the new school. Criticicn of the Brotherhood in these terns
can be compared ,1th one of the definitions proposed by ».W*
Hobson, in an important tv/entio th-c entury essay on ?re-
Haphaelite poetry: "a care for finish of style and ~>olish of
phrasing takes the place of a scrupulous effort at definition
of "^
Another glfiice at the 1P85 discuo:donr. of Hunt's painting,
or at Lang's Millais catalogue of 1081 shows that the new