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The Humble in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature and Arts

 | 
Isabelle Brasme
, 
Jean-Michel Ganteau
, 
Christine Reynier

Part One. Humble Art Forms

Artful Humility: A Pre-Raphaelite Ideal?

Laurence Roussillon-Constanty

Résumé

In Modern Painters as much as in Time and Tide (1867), John Ruskin insists that humility is not only ‘the true mark of a great man’ but the only attitude that allows the artist, the religious man or the educator to truly see things as they are. How did this position actually inspire the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s poetic, aesthetic and political stance and artistic practice? That is the main issue addressed in this article.

Texte intégral

  • 1 See his depiction of Ruskin in his recent film, Turner (UK, 2014).

1‘The first test of a truly great man is his humility.’ Ruskin’s maxim, now shamelessly used by Internet users and clever advertisers alike to promote moral values or sell inspirational door mats may sound like a rather stern point of entry into an analysis on the notion of humility in early Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics; taken out of context and held at point blank range as the wise words of a rather sententious Victorian sage, the expression smacks of old school morality and could even sound ironic coming from a man whose own posture—according to his own contemporaries as much as film-director Mike Leigh1—was far from humble. However, when one actually reads Ruskin’s sentence within the larger context of his writings on art, one realizes that there is more than first meets the eye and that his statement is part of a much more enticing and stimulating discussion on the qualities to be developed by the writers and artists of his time.

2The passage is taken from Modern Painters, volume 3, written in 1854 in which Ruskin examines landscape-painting. In the course of the chapter, the critic devotes numerous pages to both Walter Scott and Turner, praising them for the sincerity with which they accomplish their art. Being humble, in his view as in the traditional Christian perspective, entails adopting a certain stance and approaching one’s subject while remaining aware of one’s own identity—or having a strong sense of self—while remaining aware of one’s worth. To give the passage full justice, it has to be read in full:

  • 2 The Complete Works of John Ruskin (Library Edition), 39 vols., eds. E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (Lo (...)

I believe the first test of a truly great man is his humility. I do not mean, by humility, doubt of his own power, or hesitation in speaking his opinions; but a right understanding of the relation between what he can do and say, and the rest of the world’s sayings and doings. All great men not only know their business, but usually know that they know it; and are not only right in their main opinions, but they usually know that they are right in them; only they do not think much of themselves on that account.2

3What Ruskin seems to be doing here but also throughout his later so-called social writings is to use the traditional Christian and moral value of humility as exemplified by such canonical figures of the humble as Job in the Old Testament or The Virgin Mary in the New Testament in order to define a new kind of aesthetics or ideal whereby writers and artists are seen as mediators (‘the greatness is not in them, but through them,’ my emphasis)—facilitators who do not hold any answers as much as question their contemporaries through their own artistic practice and perhaps in the way they challenge the fashionable standards of their time. In Turner’s case, for instance, it might mean reclaiming landscape painting as a respectable genre or using watercolour instead of oil painting.

4How did contemporary artists and writers foreshadow, interpret or amplify Ruskin’s critical thought and argument and his view of ‘the humble’ in their own productions or artistic ideal? This is what I should like to address in this article by focusing on the so-called first pre-Raphaelite movement and through the prism of what is now regarded as their artistic manifesto—The Germ. I propose to develop three aspects of the humble: humble subject, humble form and humble artist.

  • 3 The Germ Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature, and Art, 4 issues published January–May 185 (...)

5To start with, one should first of all say a few words about magazine itself. The Germ was a short-lived literary magazine whose publication was initiated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his fellow artists in the wake of the first exhibition by members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1849 after their first show at the Free Exhibition. Only four issues of the magazine were published between January and April 1850 and in terms of audience and reception the venture was an editorial failure, not least because as even its editor William Michael Rossetti admitted when reproducing facsimiles of the issues in 1901, some of the printed articles and poems it contained were not very good.3

6However, when exploring the PRB’s initial urge to reform contemporary art practices and turn away from academic painting as well as analyzing their intellectual positioning, the various short-stories, essays and poems published in The Germ can be seen as illustrating the young artists’ wish to ‘go back to basics’ that is to the very ground from which all art should stem in their eyes. In this regard, the very title The Germ draws attention to the experimental character of the initiative. In this respect, the very term ‘germ’ implies growth, natural evolution but also incompleteness, as well as the desire to return to the original and fertile place from which art can spring, the earth or humus from which the adjective humble derives and from which a more sincere kind of art or poetry can be envisaged. As the foreword to the first issue of the journal summarises, the common purpose intended by the contributors to the journal was to ‘enunciate the principles of those who, in the true spirit of Art, enforce a rigid adherence to the simplicity of Nature either in Art or Poetry, and consequently regardless whether emanating from practical Artists, or from those who have studied nature in the Artist’s School’ (193).

7Two aspects are thus entwined here which are resonant with Ruskin’s own views: one is that artists should go back to nature and try to picture things as they are with as little mediation as possible and the other is that in a way, the subject makes the artist so that there should not be any clear cut distinction between the artist and the craftsman.

8In his long essay ‘The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art,’ artist and art critic Frederick George Stephens reminds the reader of the directions modern art has recently been taking and describes the modern school’s agenda by insisting on their ‘entire seeking after originality in a humbler manner than has been practiced since the decline of Italian Art in the Middle Ages’ (58). Like Ruskin, Stephens feels the decadence of the age and insists that just like landscape painters, English historical painters should look back to the stylised art of the Early Italians for ‘their firm attachment to truth in every point of representation’ (58). Unsurprisingly, the term humility he uses to describe their art refers to the Primitive artists’ monastic retirement but also to their painting technique and particular designing skills. Following their example, Stephens adds, the modern artist should develop ‘a humility of knowledge, a diffidence of attainment’ (59). Interestingly, the example that Stephens chooses to illustrate his point is not Giotto’s well-known Lamentation in the Scrovegni Chapel but a (now untraced) Niello group by an unknown Florentine artist the Virgin Mary lamenting the death of the Saviour but the point he makes runs along the same lines as the commentary Ruskin previously made about Giotto’s religious painting: ‘He painted—the Madonna, and St. Joseph, and the Christ, —yes, by all means if you choose to call them so, but essentially—Mamma, Papa and the Baby’ (Ruskin 1906, XXIII, 333). Indeed, the remarkable feature Stephens underlines is the fact that the Florentine artist has treated the subject in a truthful or sincere way and represented Mary in a realistic fashion focusing on her frame of mind as much as on the execution of a type.

  • 4 Suzanne Fagence Cooper, Pre-Raphaelite Art in the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: V & A Publica (...)

9In a similar way, in the early 1850s both William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were looking up to Italian art and more specifically to Fra Angelico for both humble subject and humble execution. As Suzanne Fagence Cooper reminds us in the catalogue to Pre-Raphaelite Art in the Victoria and Albert Museum, when both young men saw Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin while visiting Le Louvre in 1849, it was the centrality of the Virgin Mary as much as the painter’s colour and technique that they found impressive.4 For Rossetti, the humble figure of Mary was a topos and a pictorial motif he actually went on to develop both in his painting and his poetry of the 1850s for instance in ‘My Sister’s Sleep,’ a poem first published in The New Monthly Belle Assemblée in 1848 and then republished in The Germ in January 1850. In keeping with Stephens’s notion that Mary should be represented first and foremost as a humble, suffering figure, Rossetti describes a mother’s experience of her daughter’s death in a simple and unaffected manner:

  • 5 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Writings, ed. Jan Marsh (London: J.W. Dent, 1999) 3, 1–4.

She fell asleep on Christmas Eve. Upon her eyes’ most patient calms The lids were shut; her uplaid arms Covered her bosom, I believe.5

10In most of those early productions the poet seems to have derived his notion of sincerity which, to some extent equates with artistic humility, from the representation of the Virgin Mary not only in early Italian art and but also in the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti and his contemporaries which often both elevate the woman they admire to the status of Mary and frame their own poetry in the context of a particular genre—i.e., devotional pictures to The Virgin.

  • 6 As every Dante reader will be aware, Rossetti’s expression is reminiscent of The Hymn to Mary in Pa (...)

11Two things are notable here: first, in terms of subject, Early Italian culture provided Rossetti with an example of courtly poetry where the poet’s muse is often depicted as a syncretic figure that shares in Mary’s sanctity and imperfection. In his 1847 poem Mater Pulchrae Delectionis (later retitled Ave), Rossetti thus describes Mary in a striking metaphor as ‘Headstone of humanity / Groundstone of the great Mystery’ (Marsh, 1999, 189, l. 26–27), a humble figure par excellence rooted in earth and literally inspiring men to elevate themselves towards God.6

  • 7 See for instance Cooper 12.

12Secondly, at a metatextual level, in his later so-called double works of art that combine a poem and a painting, the close relation between subject and form—poetry and painting—allows him to encourage his fellow-artists to found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in imitation of two religious orders advocating fidelity to nature and humility, the Saint Luke Brothers (later called the Nazarenes) and the Franciscans. While it is common knowledge among nineteenth-century scholars that there were many connections (as well as a number of contrasts) between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Nazarenes7 fewer commentators have so far observed the intimate—if intricate—connection between the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Franciscan order, also called Friars Minors whose life and actions were ruled by humble conduct or, in the words attributed to their founder, Saint Francis, with eyes at ground level.

13However, as Jerome McGann first pointed out, Rossetti himself drew the parallel between the Franciscans and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in a footnote to his translation of a poem by Cavalcanti dealing with famous miracles recorded in the Chronicles of Florence caused by a painting of the Virgin in the church of San Michele d’Orto.

  • 8 The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Archive ed. Jerome McGan (...)

14As the critic underlines, in the translated poem, ‘DGR’s reserved wit becomes a sign of the polemical aggression concealed in the PRB Brethren’s return to humble pictorial models by pictores ignoti, “Lesser Brethren” who came before and set an example for the PRB program.’ The prose note added to the translated lines obliquely states the poet’s awareness of the kinship between both brotherhoods: ‘The Franciscans, in profession of deeper poverty and humility than belonged to other Orders, called themselves Fratres minores.’8

  • 9 ‘The task of the translator (and with all humility be it spoken) is one of some self-denial. Often (...)

15Through his translation of early Italian poetry—which he also defined as a humbling process of self-denial9—what Rossetti is learning but also advocating here, is how to transfigure moral value or religious feeling into artistic practice and combine composure and composition, modest stance and humble statement.

16How did this process become apparent in his religious poetry and painting? Can the same process be illustrated by works of art produced by members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or by artists more or less connected to the group in the early days of Pre-Raphaelitism? This is what I should like to consider now by examining Rossetti’s two canonical Marian pictures and unravelling one particular thread of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood history and early aesthetics.

  • 10 I use the term ‘insignificant’ in reference to Jerome Mc Gann’s seminal article about the use of Ch (...)
  • 11 Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vol (...)
  • 12 For in-depth analysis of the processes at work here, see: Wolfgang Lottes, ‘ “Take Out the Picture (...)

17For a Victorian audience as much as for the contemporary public today Rossetti’s most famous and emblematic depictions of the Virgin are his two paintings, The Girlhood of Virgin Mary and Ecce Ancilla Domini (later re-titled The Annunciation) both painted in 1849. As critics have observed, these paintings which are double works of art combining a picture and a couple of sonnets written alongside stand at the centre of Rossetti’s early programmatic ideas to renovate poetical and pictorial practices. In this respect, both subjects not only illustrate a biblical episode but also highlight the strong relation between the textual and the visual as the Scripture foreshadows what is to come and delivers the sacred meaning of a potentially insignificant10 visual scene. In terms of text and image relations the theme of the Annunciation can be regarded as a threshold, a transition from the text—the initial words uttered by the archangel Gabriel and usually painted as phylacteries—to the image, from God’s message to Mary’s transformed body brought forth through the mystery of the Incarnation—a metamorphosis Rossetti initially rendered manifest in the circulation between the various media: as Virginia Surtees indicates in her Catalogue Raisonné, at first, ‘The two sonnets were printed on a slip of gold-covered paper and fixed to the frame of the picture,’11 thus removing the sacred words to a peripheral position and placing the text in a subservient—and humbler position.12

18In relation to the visual representation of humility, we could also argue that the distinctive features of the sonnets and their accompanying pictures are to be related to Rossetti’s wish to emulate Primitive art as much as to emancipate from it by giving a new—and more modern—turn to an age-old tradition. This is easily demonstrated if we compare Rossetti’s paintings to the types they refer to and from which they depart.

19In his painting The Girlhood of Mary Virgin for instance, Rossetti mixes two iconographic traditions: the pictorial cycles of the childhood of the Virgin and the specific genre of the Madonna of Humility. When most famous religious pictures show the young Mary reading a book, Rossetti chooses to show the maiden embroidering, a departure that we can either interpret as pointing towards the past or moving forward towards realism or verisimilitude. In his own description of the painting in a letter to Charles Lyell dated 14 November 1848, Rossetti remarked:

  • 13 The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William E. Fredeman (Cambridge: D. Brewer, 2002) (...)

The subject is the education of the Blessed Virgin, one which has been treated at various times by Murillo and other painters, —but, as I cannot but think, in a very inadequate manner, since they have invariably represented her as reading from a book under the superintendence of her Mother, St Anne, an occupation obviously incompatible with these times, and which could only pass muster if treated in a purely symbolical manner. In order, therefore, to attempt something more probable and at the same time less commonplace, I have represented the future Mother of Our Lord as occupied in embroidering a lily, —always under the direction of St Anne; the flower she is copying being held by two little angels.13

  • 14 For a parallel between The Virgin Mary and ancient figures, see A. Wasowitz, ‘Traditions antiques d (...)
  • 15 See Bentley’s remark: ‘The most powerful result of the Oxford Movement, as far as women were concer (...)

20Beside considerations concerning realism, Rossetti’s motivation for depicting Mary embroidering clearly lies in his wish to show the symbolic value of embroidery and to combine references to the past and to the present times. Indeed, in byzantine iconography, the Marian figure is often shown spinning, an occupation symbolising the creation of life and possibly referring to such mythological figures as Arachne, Athena or Clotho, the youngest of the Three Fates responsible for spinning the thread of life.14 In a Victorian context, one can also suggest that Mary is spinning the thread of her own life and exemplifying a particular type of womanhood: that of the accomplished young lady bent on perfecting her own nature through artistic practice. In representing Mary as a woman embroidering Rossetti could thus be gesturing towards the working women who may have viewed the painting and recognised the value of domesticity as a form of sanctity but also referring to the talents of the women gravitating in the Pre-Raphaelites’s artistic and domestic sphere. In the Rossetti household alone, one obviously thinks of the artist’s mother Frances and his sister Christina who both modelled for the painting but one can also think of Jane Burden (later Morris) who was a talented embroideress and also later modelled for the PRB. Finally, on a more ideological level, the allusion to embroidery may point to the religious debates of the time on Tractarianism and the Oxford movement that introduced significant changes in liturgical practices.15

  • 16 For a recent analysis on the role played by Ford Madox Brown in the foundation of the Pre-Raphaelit (...)

21In a similar way, the formal composition of the picture stands at the crossroads between past and present as it points back to fifteenth-century Italian style depictions of the Madonna of humility as much as to contemporary Victorian painting. Indeed, the composition of the picture may first recall such paintings as Fra Angelico’s Virgin of Humility (Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection 1433–1435) in which the Virgin is depicted seated on a cushion placed directly on the ground against a golden curtain contrasting with the rounded arched shape of the background elements. At the same time, the painting probably owes a lot to Ford Madox Brown’s revisiting of Flemish painting style and to his innovative compositions such as his pastel and watercolour picture, Our Ladye of Good Children (1847) which also displays an arched top and uses a similar painting technique.16 Again, what is brought to the fore here is not only the traditional iconography of the Virgin Mary but also the figure of the Archangel Gabriel whose role as emissary of God is to intercede between Him and Mary and encourage humility. The bowl of water he is carrying is meant to purify the woman and child.

  • 17 Lucy Rabin, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite History Picture (New York: Garland, 1978) 215.

22What is remarkable in this version of eternal motherhood is the way in which form and content but also image and text coalesce in order to turn the humble subject into a modern statement. In the same way, Rossetti’s painting not only celebrates the figure of Mary but also suggests the key mediating role of women in Christian history as well as in the Victorian domestic sphere—and more pointedly within the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Just as Ford Madox Brown ‘had thematically associated in his painting the Victorian middle-class mother with the eternal mother of history, religion and art,’17 so Rossetti’s Girlhood of Virgin Mary can be seen as bringing together the canonical figure of Mary and the artist’s sister modelling for the Holy figure, ‘Christ-ina’ Rossetti, thus making her a visible—if informal member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

  • 18 Interestingly, in his commentary to the picture, the painter explained that in executing the pictur (...)
  • 19 See Jeremy Mass, ‘Homan Hunt and the Light of the World’ (Aldershot: Wildwood House, 1987).
  • 20 The poem was published in The English Woman’s Journal where it appeared in the December issue for 1 (...)

23Deriving from Ruskin’s principles of truth to nature and simplicity of form, Rossetti’s first Pre-Raphaelite pictures can thus be seen as an attempt at translating Christian humility and turning the Christian dogma into a radical aesthetic statement that is powerfully expressed through the flatness of the picture plane as much as the countenance of the human characters. In both The Girlhood of Virgin Mary and Ecce Ancilla Domini, the humble figure is therefore not only the subject of the picture but an active participant in the making of its significance and meaning. In the process, the humble figure of Mary, alias Christina Rossetti, stands out as a powerful mediator between the private and the public spheres and the earthly and the heavenly realms—a humble figure embodying the words of the Gospel according to which ‘God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’ (James 4: 6). Unsurprisingly, in a later and no less emblematic Pre-Raphaelite picture, William Holman Hunt again turned to Christina Rossetti’s unassuming presence to embody the haunting and androgynous figure of Christ in The Light of the World (1851–1853)18—a painting that received massive critical acclaim19 and elicited many artistic and poetic responses. In a contemporary poem inspired by the painting, Christina Rossetti herself responded to the painting by writing a piece entitled, ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock’20 in which she used the famous line from Revelations to frame a parable describing a lady’s sin of pride and eventual punishment. In this ultimate example of inter-artistic collaboration, the humble ‘sister’ thus found herself transfigured and raised to a self-denying and yet prominent figure—a common and persistent thread running through the history of Pre-Raphaelitism.

24Further enquiry into the evolution of the Pre-Raphaelite movement would enable us to see how artists belonging to the younger generation like William Morris or Edward Burne-Jones developed Ruskin’s initial stance for this humbler form in/of art in multiple ways and through various channels, from their involvement with the Working Men’s College (founded by a group of Christian Socialists in 1854) to the foundation of the decorating firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co in 1861 in which women were also involved. In a telling shift from the ‘lesser brethren’ to the lesser arts, William Morris could later in the century be heard encouraging craftsmen to have quiet confidence in truth and beauty instead of relishing in pride and fashion. Echoing Ruskin’s statement quoted above, Morris was again to plead for humility in art but the focus of his talk reveals a shift from great men to the common man—a sign that art and society had entered a new phase where the lesser arts were simply to become the better arts:

  • 21 William Morris, ‘Art: a Serious Thing, 1882,’ delivered at the annual distribution of prizes at the (...)

I think sometimes that there have been ages in the world’s history of which ours is one, that have thought over much of the glories of men, and not enough of the welfare of common men; such ages have had a tendency to carry due hero-worship, which is a proper and necessary thing, into superstition [. . .] not remembering that the foundation of all greatness is humility; you must be a man before you are a great man.21

Notes

1 See his depiction of Ruskin in his recent film, Turner (UK, 2014).

2 The Complete Works of John Ruskin (Library Edition), 39 vols., eds. E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903–1912) V, chapter XVI, 331.

3 The Germ Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature, and Art, 4 issues published January–May 1850; facsimile reprint with an Introduction by William Michael Rossetti (London: Elliot Stock, 1901), this reprint also reproduced in facsimile as The Germ: The Literary Magazine of the Pre-Raphaelites, with a preface by Andrea Rose (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum 1992) 27.

4 Suzanne Fagence Cooper, Pre-Raphaelite Art in the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: V & A Publications, 2003) 13.

5 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Writings, ed. Jan Marsh (London: J.W. Dent, 1999) 3, 1–4.

6 As every Dante reader will be aware, Rossetti’s expression is reminiscent of The Hymn to Mary in Paradiso where The Virgin is described as ‘Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio! Umile ed alta più che creatura, Terrains fisso d’eterno consiglio;’ in Cary’s classic translation: ‘Oh, Virgin-Mother, daughter of thy Son! Created beings all in lowliness/Surpassing, as in height above them all;’ Dante Alighieri, Purgatory and Paradise, trans. the Rev. Henry Francis Cary (Chicago: Thompson & Thomas, 1901), Canto XXXIII.

7 See for instance Cooper 12.

8 The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Archive ed. Jerome McGann, www.rossettiarchive.org/, 2008. Web.

9 ‘The task of the translator (and with all humility be it spoken) is one of some self-denial. Often would he avail himself of any special grace of his own idiom and epoch, if only his will belonged to him: often would some cadence serve him but for his author’s structure—some structure but for his author’s cadence: often the beautiful turn of a stanza must be weakened to adopt some rhyme which will tally, and he sees the poet reveling in abundance of language where himself is scantily supplied.’ Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Early Italian Poets (London: Smith, Elder & co, 1861) 10.

10 I use the term ‘insignificant’ in reference to Jerome Mc Gann’s seminal article about the use of Christian detail in Rossetti’s poetry: Jerome Mcgann, ‘Rossetti’s Significant Details,’ Victorian Poetry 7/1 (Spring 1969): 41–54.

11 Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 1971) I, 11.

12 For in-depth analysis of the processes at work here, see: Wolfgang Lottes, ‘ “Take Out the Picture and Frame the Sonnet,” Rossetti’s Sonnets and Verses for His own Works of Art,’ Anglia 96 (1978): 108.

13 The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William E. Fredeman (Cambridge: D. Brewer, 2002) I, 48,12. Rossetti probably drew his knowledge on the representation of the Virgin Mary from his reading of Anna Jameson’s Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art (London, 1848).

14 For a parallel between The Virgin Mary and ancient figures, see A. Wasowitz, ‘Traditions antiques dans les scènes de l’annonciation,’ Dialogues d’histoire ancienne 16 (1990): 163–177. See also: Maria Vassilaki, Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantine Art (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005).

15 See Bentley’s remark: ‘The most powerful result of the Oxford Movement, as far as women were concerned, appeared to be the embroidering of altar-cloths and other ecclesiastical furnishings.’ D. M. Bentley, ‘Rossetti’s “Ave” and Related Pictures,’ Victorian Poetry 15 (1977) 34.

16 For a recent analysis on the role played by Ford Madox Brown in the foundation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, see: Tim Barrringer, chapter ‘Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893),’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (Cambridge: CUP, 2012) 148–163.

17 Lucy Rabin, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite History Picture (New York: Garland, 1978) 215.

18 Interestingly, in his commentary to the picture, the painter explained that in executing the picture, he had merely been following divine instruction and served rather than led.

19 See Jeremy Mass, ‘Homan Hunt and the Light of the World’ (Aldershot: Wildwood House, 1987).

20 The poem was published in The English Woman’s Journal where it appeared in the December issue for 1861. See: Diane D’Amico, ‘Christina Rossetti and The English Woman’s Journal,’ Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies (Spring 1994): III, 20–24.

21 William Morris, ‘Art: a Serious Thing, 1882,’ delivered at the annual distribution of prizes at the Leek School of Arts, Leek, on December 12, 1882, in William Morris on Art and Socialism, ed. Norman Kelvin (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999) 99.

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