I have added a few Pre-Raphaelite artists/masters
who have gifted us with their paintings of sensual mythology.
I consider them visionary artists, I always have. I hope you will
agree.
Our compilation is not complete by any means, there are so many we
love.
Love's Secret
by William Blake
Never seek to tell thy love,
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind doth move
Silently, invisibly.
I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears :-
Ah! She did depart.
Soon after she was gone from me
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly:
He took her with a sigh.
Please
enjoy your visit LionHeart August
2009
Visionary Art
The Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood
The
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (also known as the Pre-Raphaelites)
was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848
by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
The three founders were soon joined by William Michael Rossetti,
James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and
Thomas Woolner to form a seven member "brotherhood".
The group's intention was to reform art by rejecting what they considered
to be
the mechanistic approach first adopted by the Mannerist artists
who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo.
They believed that the Classical poses and elegant compositions of
Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on the academic
teaching of art.
Hence the name "Pre-Raphaelite". In particular,
they objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds,
the founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts.
They called him "Sir Sloshua", believing that his broad
technique
was a sloppy and formulaic form of academic Mannerism.
In contrast, they wanted to return to the abundant detail,
intense colours, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian
and Flemish art.
The Pre-Raphaelites have been considered the first avant-garde movement
in art,
though they have also been denied that status,
because they continued to accept both the concepts of history painting
and of mimesis, or imitation of nature, as central to the purpose
of art.
However, the Pre-Raphaelites undoubtedly defined themselves as a reform-movement,
created a distinct name for their form of art, and published a periodical,
The Germ, to promote their ideas. Their debates were recorded in the
Pre-Raphaelite Journal.
The Brotherhood's early doctrines were expressed
in four declarations:
1. To have genuine ideas to express;
2. To study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;
3. To sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in
previous art,
to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parodying and learned
by rote;
4. And, most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures
and statues.
Maxfield Parrish attended Haverford
College and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
He entered into an artistic career that lasted for more than half
a century,
and which helped shape the Golden Age of illustration and the future
of American visual arts.
He lived his entire life at his New Hampshire home/studio at The Oaks
with his wife,
who died in 1953, and his mistress and model, Sue Lewin, who survived
his death in 1966 at age 95.
He was by all accounts a charming and intelligent man whose flouting
of social mores
seems
to be of a piece with the 'exceptions' granted the rich and talented.
He certainly qualified.
Parrish's work defies categorization since he was part of no traditional
movement or school,
and developed an original and individual style. However, his work
has been highly influential.
Parrish's art features dazzlingly luminous colors;
the color Parrish blue was named in acknowledgement.
He achieved the results by means of a technique called glazing
where bright layers of oil color separated by varnish
are applied alternately over a base rendering
(Parrish usually used a blue and white monochromatic underpainting).
He would build up the depth in his paintings by photographing, enlarging,
projecting and tracing half- or full-size objects or figures.
Parrish then cut out and placed the images on his canvas,
covering them with thick, but clear, layers of glaze.
The result is realism of elegiac vivacity.
His work achieves a unique three-dimensional appearance,
which does not translate well to coffee table books.
Maxfield
Parrish
by Coy Ludwig
Maxfield
Parrish: The Masterworks
by Alma Gilbert
Maxfield
Parrish: A Retrospective
by Laurence S. Cutler, Judy Goffman Cutler, Maxfield Parrish
The Art of
Maxfield Parrish (CD-ROM)
by John Goodspeed Stuart
Maxfield
Parrish: 1870-1966
by Sylvia Yount
Maxfield
Parrish and the Illustrators of the Golden Age
by Margaret E. Wagner, Maxfield Parrish
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882)
was an English poet, illustrator, painter
and translator. The son of émigré Italian scholar
Gabriel Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti
and his wife Frances Polidori, D.G. Rossetti was born in London, England
and originally named Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti.
His family and friends called him "Gabriel", but in publications
he put the name
Dante first (in honour of Dante Alighieri).
He was the brother of poet Christina Rossetti, the critic William
Michael Rossetti,
and author Maria Francesca Rossetti, and was a founder of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with John Everett Millais and William Holman
Hunt.
In 1861, Rossetti published The Early Italian Poets,
a set of English translations
of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova.
These, and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, inspired his art in
the 1850s.
His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design
also inspired his new friends of this time, William Morris and Edward
Burne-Jones.
Rossetti also typically wrote sonnets for his pictures, such as "Astarte
Syriaca".
As a designer, he worked with William Morris to produce images
for stained glass and other decorative devices.
Toward the end of his life, Rossetti sank into a
morbid state,
darkened by his drug addiction to chloral and increasing mental instability,
possibly worsened by his reaction to savage critical attacks on his
disinterred (1869) poetry from the manuscript poems he had buried
with his wife.
He spent his last years as a recluse.
On Easter Sunday, 1882, he died at the country house of a friend,
where he had gone in yet another vain attempt to recover his health,
which had been destroyed by chloral as his wife's had been destroyed
by laudanum.
He is buried at Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, England.
His grave is visited regularly by admirers of his life's work and
achievements
and this can be seen by fresh flowers placed there regularly.
Dream-Love
Young Love lies sleeping
In May-time of the year,
Among the lilies,
Lapped in the tender light:
White lambs come grazing,
White doves come building there:
And round about him
The May-bushes are white.
Soft moss the pillow
For oh, a softer cheek;
Broad leaves cast shadow
Upon the heavy eyes:
There wind and waters
Grow lulled and scarcely speak;
There twilight lingers
The longest in the skies.
Young Love lies dreaming;
But who shall tell the dream?
A perfect sunlight
On rustling forest tips;
Or perfect moonlight
Upon a rippling stream;
Or perfect silence,
Or song of cherished lips.
Burn odours round him
To fill the drowsy air;
Weave silent dances
Around him to and fro;
For oh, in waking
The sights are no so fair,
And song and silence
Are not like these below.
Young Love lies dreaming
Till summer days are gone, -
Dreaming and drowsing
Away to perfect sleep:
He sees the beauty
Sun hath not looked upon,
And tastes the fountain
Unutterably deep.
Him perfect music
Doth hush unto his rest,
And through the pauses
The perfect silence calms:
Oh, poor the voices
Of earth from east to west,
And poor earth's stillness
Between her stately palms.
Young Love lies drowsing
Away to poppied death;
Cool shadows deepen
Across the sleeping face:
So fails the summer
With warm delicious breath;
And what hath autumn
To give us in its place?
Draw close the curtains
Of branched evergreen;
Change cannot touch them
With fading fingers sere:
Here first the violets
Perhaps with bud unseen,
And a dove, may be,
Return to nestle here.
"Each
day I go to my studio full of joy; in
the evening when obliged to stop because of darkness
I can scarcely wait for the morning to come...
My work is not only a pleasure, it has become a necessity.
No matter how many other things I have in my life,
ifI cannot give myself to my dear painting I am miserable." William
Bouguereau Bouguereau was a French academic painter.
Bouguereau (pronounced boo goh roe) was a staunch traditionalist
whose realistic genre paintings
and mythological themes were modern interpretations of Classical
subjects
with a heavy emphasis on the female human body.
Although he created an idealized world, his almost photo-realistic
style was popular with rich art patrons.
He was very famous in his time but today his subject matter and
technique
receive relatively little attention compared to the popularity of
the Impressionists.
Bouguereau employed traditional methods of working up a painting,
including detailed pencil studies and oil sketches, and his careful
method resulted in
a pleasing and accurate rendering of the human form.
His painting of skin, hands, and feet was particularly admired.
He also used some of the religious and erotic symbolism of the Old
Masters,
such as the “broken pitcher” which connoted lost innocence.
In 1877, both his wife and
infant son died.
At a rather advanced age, Bouguereau was married for the second
time in 1896,
to fellow artist Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau, one of his pupils.
He also used his influence to open many French art institutions
to women for the first time, including the Académie française.
He painted eight hundred and twenty-six paintings.
Today, over one hundred museums throughout the world exhibit Bouguereau's
works
"One has to seek Beauty and Truth, Sir!
As I always say to my pupils, you have to work to the finish.
There's only one kind of painting.
It is the painting that present s the eye with perfection,
the kind of beautiful and impeccable enamel you find in Veronese
and Titian."
William Bouguereau, 1895
JW Waterhouse was an English
Pre-Raphaelite painter
who is most famous for his paintings of
female characters from Greek and Arthurian mythology.
Waterhouse was one of the final Pre-Raphaelite artists,
being most productive in the latter decades of the 19th century
and early decades of the 20th, long after the era of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood.
Because of this, he has been referred to as "the modern Pre-Raphaelite",
and incorporated techniques borrowed from the French Impressionists
into his work.
Waterhouses' early works
were not Pre-Raphaelite in nature,
but were of classical themes in the spirit of Alma-Tadema and Frederic
Leighton. These early works were exhibited
at the Dudley Gallery, and the Society of British Artists,
and in 1874 his painting Sleep and His Half Brother Death
was exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition.
The painting was a success and Waterhouse would exhibit at the annual
exhibition
every year until 1916, with the exception of 1890 and 1915.
He then went from strength to strength in the London art scene,
with his 1876 piece After the Dance being given the
prime position in that year's summer exhibition.
Perhaps due to his success, his paintings typically became larger
and larger in size.
One of Waterhouse's most
famous paintings is The Lady of Shalott,
a study of Elaine of Astolat, who dies of grief when Lancelot will
not love her.
He actually painted three different versions of this character,
in 1888, 1894, and 1916.
Another of Waterhouse's favorite subjects was Ophelia;
the most famous of his paintings of Ophelia depicts her just before
her death,
putting flowers in her hair as she sits on a tree branch leaning
over a lake.
Like The Lady of Shalott and other Waterhouse paintings,
it deals with a woman dying in or near water.
He also may have been inspired by paintings of Ophelia by
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Millais.
He submitted his Ophelia painting of 1888 in order to receive his
diploma
from the Royal Academy. (He had originally wanted to submit a painting
titled "A Mermaid",
but it was not completed in time.)
After this, the painting was lost until the 20th century,
and is now displayed in the collection of Lord Andrew Lloyd-Webber.
Waterhouse would paint Ophelia again in 1894 and 1909 or 1910,
and planned another painting in the series, called "Ophelia
in the Churchyard."
Waterhouse could not finish the series of Ophelia paintings
because he was gravely ill with cancer by 1915.
He died two years later, and his grave can be found at Kensal Green
Cemetery in London.
J.W.
Waterhouse
by Peter Trippi
J W Waterhouse
by Anthony Hobson
Myth and
Romance : Notecards
by J.W. Waterhouse
Lord
Frederick Leighton 1830-1896 Lord
Leighton World
Leighton was born in Scarborough to a family in the
import and export business.
He was educated at University College School, London.
He then received his artistic training on the European continent,
first from Eduard Von Steinle and then from Giovanni Costa.
When in Florence, aged 24, where he studied at the Accademia di
Belle Arti,
he painted the procession of the Cimabue Madonna through the Borgo
Allegri.
He lived in Paris from 1855 to 1859, where he met Ingres, Delacroix,
Corot and Millet.
In 1860, he moved to London, where he associated with the Pre-Raphaelites.
He designed Elizabeth Barrett Browning's tomb for Robert Browning
in the English Cemetery, Florence in 1861.
In 1864 he became an associate of the Royal Academy
and in 1878 he became its President (1878–96).
His 1877 sculpture, Athlete Wrestling with a Python,
was considered at its time to inaugurate a renaissance
in contemporary British sculpture, referred to as the New Sculpture.
His paintings represented Britain at the great 1900 Paris Exhibition.
Leighton was knighted at Windsor in 1878, and was created a baronet
eight years later.
He was the first painter to be given a peerage, in the New Year
Honours List of 1896.
The patent creating him Baron Leighton of Stretton in the County
of Shropshire,
was issued on 24 January 1896; Leighton died the next day of angina
pectoris.
The
Art of Lord Leighton
by Christopher Newall
Frederic
Lord Leighton
by Richard Ormond
Sir
Lawrence Alma-Tadema
1836-1919 Sir
Lawrence
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema was one of the most renowned
painters of late nineteenth-century Britain.
Born in Dronrijp, the Netherlands, and trained at the Royal Academy
of Antwerp, Belgium,
he settled in England in 1870 and spent the rest of his life there.
A classical-subject painter, he became famous for his depictions
of
the luxury and decadence of the Roman Empire,
with languorous figures set in fabulous marbled interiors
or against a backdrop of dazzling blue Mediterranean sea and sky.
Universally admired during his lifetime for his superb draftsmanship
and depictions of Classical antiquity,
he fell into disrepute after his death and only in the last thirty
years
has his work been reevaluated for its importance within nineteenth-century
English art.
Sir Edward was an English
artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the
Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris
on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris,
Marshall, Faulkner, and Company.
Burne-Jones was closely involved in the rejuvenation of the tradition
of
stained glass art in England; his stained glass works include the
windows of Birmingham Cathedral,
St Martin's Church in Brampton, Cumbria, the church designed by
Philip Webb,
All Saints, Jesus Lane, Cambridge and in Christ Church College,
Oxford.
Burne-Jones's early paintings show the heavy inspiration of Dante
Gabriel Rossetti,
but by the 1860s Burne-Jones was discovering his own artistic "voice".
In 1877, he was persuaded to show eight oil paintings at the
Grosvenor Gallery (a new rival to the Royal Academy).
These included The Beguiling of Merlin.
The timing was right, and he was taken up as a
herald and star of the new Aesthetic Movement.
In addition to painting and stained glass, Burne-Jones worked in
a variety of crafts;
including designing ceramic tiles, jewellery, tapestries, and illustration,
most famously designing woodcuts for the Kelmscott Press's Chaucer
in 1896.
"In my view, what he did for us common people was to open,
as never had been opened before, magic casements of a land of faery
in which he lived throughout his life ...
It is in that inner world we can cherish in peace,
beauty which he has left us and in which there is peace at least
for ourselves.
The few of us who knew him and loved him well, always keep him in
our hearts,
but his work will go on long after we have passed away.
It may give its message in one generation to a few or in other to
many more,
but there it will be for ever for those who seek in their generation,
for beauty and for those who can recognise and reverence
a great man, and a great artist. " -M. Baldwin"
In 1898 Burne-Jones had an attack of influenza,
and had apparently recovered, when he was again taken suddenly ill,
and died on 17 June 1898.
Six days later, at the intervention of the Prince of Wales,
a memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey.
It was the first time an artist had been so honoured.
Burne-Jones was buried in Rottingdean churchyard,
near Brighton, a place he knew through summer family holidays.
Burne-Jones:
The Life and Works of Sir Edward Burne-Jones
by Christopher Wood
Sir Edward
Burne Jones
by Russell Ash
Edward Burne-Jones,
Victorian Artist-Dreamer
by Stephen Wildman
