Literature in the Pre-Raphaelite Paintings

From its very inception, subjects taken from literature

were a staple for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Shakespeare, Keats, and Tennyson were among the many
who had their mind’s work immortalized in paintings.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848. As

the name suggests, they rejected the Academy’s
fascination with the work of Raphael. Instead, they looked
in early Renaissance and late medieval work before the
time of the Italian master. That is to say, they turned to
the past to find the art of the future.
Boccaccio’s Isabella

Pre-Raphaelites and Literature: John Everett Millais, Isabella,

1848-49, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England, UK.
The grisly love story of Isabella and Lorenzo came from
a poem by John Keats, after a story in
 Boccaccio’s Decameron. According to the poem, Isabella
falls in love with Lorenzo, an employee of her father’s.
During the meal we see on the canvas, her brothers
realize their secret relationship and later murder
Lorenzo. On the painting, the young man looks intensely
at his lover while offering her an orange. This was a
delicacy of the time, since oranges were rare. Across the
table, the brothers notice the tender gesture and thus
the couple are found out.

Pre-Raphaelites and Literature: William Holman Hunt, Isabella

and the Pot of Basil, 1868, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle Upon
Tyne, England, UK.
Holman Hunt depicted a later part in the story. After Lorenzo
was murdered, Isabella finds his body and cuts off the head. She
later plants it in a pot of basil. Her brothers soon realize her
actions due to the time she spends with the plant. They steal the
pot and flee Florence. As a result, Isabella dies of sadness.
Hunt’s Isabella is quite different from Millais’. She is a sturdy
Mediterranean beauty. The painter said he wanted her to look as
if she was able to cut off a head. The young woman embraces the
pot, which is decorated with skulls to suggest its macabre
contents.

In the usual Pre-Raphaelite fashion, in both paintings, everything

is handled in minute detail. The bright colors and the stiffness of
the figures in the Millais painting comes from early Renaissance
painting.

Shakespeare’s Ophelia

Pr
e-Raphaelites and Literature: John Everett Millais, Ophelia,
1851-2, Tate Britain, London, England, UK.

Millais’ Ophelia is probably the most popular work by the Pre-

Raphaelite Brotherhood. The painting illustrates an event in
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Ophelia goes mad from grief when she
learns that Hamlet, her lover, has murdered her father. The
scene on the painting does not take place on stage. Instead, the
audience learns about her death through a conversation between
queen Gertrude and Ophelia’s brother, Laertes. The queen
describes how the young woman fell into the river, while picking
flowers, and drowned.

Millais was adamant about the realistic representation of the

subject. He spent the summer of 1851 in Surrey painting the
landscape from nature. His love for detail resulted in the lush
nature on the canvas. The model for Ophelia was Elizabeth
Siddall, later Rossetti’s wife and a Pre-Raphaelite sister. For
realism’s sake, Siddall posed in a bathtub full of water, with
lamps underneath to keep the water warm. However, at some
point the lamps went out and Millais was so absorbed in his
panting, he did not notice. Eventually, Siddall caught pneumonia
and her father held the painter responsible for medical expenses.
Pre-Raphaelites and Literature: John William
Waterhouse, Ophelia, 1894, private collection. Wikimedia
Commons.
At the turn of the century, John William Waterhouse, the best-
known inheritor of the Pre-Raphaelite style, painted his own
version of Ophelia. In his painting, the mad princess is depicted
moments before her death, still picking flowers. Waterhouse’s
style is more painterly than the first generation of painters.
Nonetheless, his affinity for their style and literature based
subject matter is still there.

Dante’s Beata Beatrix

Pre-
Raphaelites and Literature: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata
Beatrix, 1864-70, Tate Britain, London, England, UK.
Throughout his life, Dante Gabriel Rossetti identified himself
with the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri. When he married
Siddall, she took the role of Beatrice, Alighieri’s beloved in Vita
Nuova. In 1862, Siddall died when she overdosed on laudanum.
Her grief-stricken husband honored her memory with this
painting.

Siddall poses as Beatrice in a dream-like space. Her eyes are

closed. She looks like she is praying. Around her float myriads of
symbols. Just above her hands, a bird leaves a white poppy
flower, the plant from which laudanum is made, suggesting
Siddall’s cause of death. A sundial casting a shadow on the
number nine marks the time of death of Beatrice. She died on the
9th of June 1290.

In the background, we see on the left Dante Alighieri and on the

right the allegorical representation of Love, in the form of angel.
Love holds the flickering soul of Beatrice/Elizabeth Siddall.
Measure for Measure

Pre-Raphaelites and Literature: William Holman Hunt, Claudio

and Isabella, 1850, Tate Britain, London, England, UK.
Measure for Measure tells the story of Claudio, a young man who
has been sentenced to death by the temporary ruler of Vienna,
Lord Angelo, for impregnating his fiancée. Isabela, Claudio’s
sister and a nun, pleads for his life to Angelo and he offers her a
deal. Claudio will be saved if she agrees to have sex with him.
However, Isabela vehemently rejects the proposal. She then goes
to see her brother in prison and prepare him for his fate. But
Claudio urges her to change her mind. This is the moment we
see on the canvas.
Holman Hun inscribed on the frame the following lines from the
play.

“Claudio: Death is a fearful thing.

Isabela: And shamed life a hateful.”
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 1603-4. Shakespeare MIT.

The siblings are in stark contrast. Claudio crouches partly in

shadow averting his gaze from his sister. He wears colorful and
expensive clothing. On the other hand, Isabela sits upright
wearing a simple white nun’s habit. She is fully in the light,
symbolizing her purity. The lute behind her is a symbol of lust,
reminding us the cause of Claudio’s predicament.

Tennyson’s Mariana

Pre-Raphaelites and Literature: John Everett

Millais, Mariana, 1851, Tate Britain, London, England, UK.
Millais painted another character from the same play, Mariana.
She was the ex-fiancé of Angelo. Angelo left her when her dowry
was lost at sea. Ever since, she lives isolated, still longing for
him. However, the inspiration for the painting came
from Mariana a poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson. These lines
accompanied the painting when it was exhibited in the Royal
Academy in 1851

“(…) She only said, “My life is dreary,

He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
Lord Alfred Tennyson, Mariana, 1830. Poetry Foundation.

On the canvas, Mariana stretches her back after a long session of

embroidery. Her pose suggests her depressed state. In front of
her is a stained-glass window with a scene of the Annunciation,
copied from the Chapel of Merton College in Oxford. On the right
widow the motto ‘In coelo quies‘, ‘In heaven there is rest’ in
Latin, refers to Mariana’s wish to die. This is a bleak scene, with
nothing to suggest the eventual happy end Mariana gets
in Shakespeare’s play.
Lady of Shalott

Pre-Raphaelites and Literature: William Holman Hunt, The Lady

of Shalott, 1888-1905, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art,
Hartford, Connecticut, USA.
Tennyson’s Arthurian poem of the cursed Lady of
Shalott fascinated the Victorians. The poem tells of an isolated
lady with a mysterious curse. She must never look out the
window. Instead, she sees the outside world through a mirror
and weaves those scenes on her loom. However, one day she
looks out the window instead of the mirror when she sees Sir
Lancelot riding by. Consequently, that activates the curse and
throws her in an emotional state as illustrated in the poem

“(…) She left the web, she left the loom,

She made three paces thro’ the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look’d down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.”
Lord Alfred Tennyson, The Lady of Shallot, 1842. Poetry Foundation.

Holman Hunt depicts the most active moment in the narrative.

The lady’s hair flows in a torrent around her as she paces around
the room. Strings from the loom have been wrapped around her
and she flays her hand to free herself. Behind her, there is the
cracked mirror, where we can see Sir Lancelot. On the left, there
is a tapestry of Hercules stealing the golden fruit in the Garden
of Hesperides.
Pre-Raphaelites and Literature: John William Waterhouse, The
Lady of Shalott, 1888, Tate Britain, London, England, UK.
Waterhouse painted a later stage of the poem

“(…) And down the river’s dim expanse

Like some bold seer in a trance,
Seeing all his own mischance –
With glassy countenance
Did she look to Camelot.
And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shalott.”
Lord Alfred Tennyson, The Lady of Shallot, 1842. Poetry Foundation.

The lady knows she going to die from the curse, due to her
sexual desire for Lancelot. As a result, she leaves the tower and
takes a boat down to Camelot. Unfortunately, by the time she
arrives she is already dead.

Waterhouse keeps the aesthetics of the Pre-Raphaelite’s, but

moves on technically to experiment with impressionism as seen
in the handling of nature.

Meinhold’s Sidonia Von Bork

Pre-Raphaelites and Literature: Edward Burne Jones, Sidonia
Von Bork, 1860, Tate Britain, London, England, UK.

Sidonia von Bork is the central character in Wilhelm Meinhold’s

gothic novel Sidonia the Sorceress. The book was published in
1847 and tells the story of the beautiful but evil Sidonia. She was
the quintessential femme fatale, something that aligned with the
Pre-Raphaelite’s interests with seductive but dangerous
femininity. The model for the witch was Fanny Cornforth,
Rossetti’s mistress and model at the time.

On the painting, Sidonia is pure evil. She looks at us with a

sidelong glance while tugging at her necklace. The black and
white pattern on her dress that Algernon Swinburne described as
‘’branching and knotted snakes’’ suggests her malicious nature.