The Pre-Raphaelites and the Apostate I Have Become—The Lady of Shalott (1)

Under tower and balcony,
By garden-wall and gallery,
A gleaming shape she floated by,
Dead-pale between the houses high,
      Silent into Camelot.

--"The Lady of Shalott," Lord Alfred Tennyson

When I heard that the Mori Arts Center Gallery in Roppongi was having a Pre-Raphaelite exhibit, I didn’t so much find time as make time to see it. “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde” is on loan from the Tate Gallery in London and features 72 works, primarily paintings. I can’t imagine a better way to spend one of those free days circumstances occasionally turn up.

I first encountered the Pre-Raphaelites when the poster fair came to my college and I bought English painter John Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott. Its almost photographic realism, the mythological subject matter and the damsel’s intense sadness made an incredible impression on me. Only years later would I learn that John Waterhouse was a later and lesser known artist of a school known as the Pre-Raphaelites.

 

The Lady of Shalott dates to 1888, 40 years after the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Paraphrasing the exhibit text, the Brotherhood’s members were tired of the strictures of the dominant artistic styles of the day, which saw the works of Raphael as their highest expression, and instead turned to artists pre-dating Raphael for inspiration even as they introduced their own innovations.

Most widely known as painters, the Pre-Raphaelites were also poets, manufactured textiles, and printed books. William Morris even wrote some of the earliest modern fantasy fiction. Occasionally, their works find their way into my collection: poetry by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina Rossetti, a copy of The Canterbury Tales illustrated by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, and Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World on my iPhone.

All these years, the Pre-Raphaelites’ style has remained one of my favorites from the history of art, but there is no doubt that I experience their works from a different perspective today. Having abandoned the airy faith of my youth for robust atheism as an adult, my reactions to the exhibit paintings depicting religious themes was surprising even to me.

 

This post is a little short, but it's really just an introduction to a short series of posts in which I'll go into this a little further.