If you haven't seen our Pre-Rapahelites exhibition you have until the end of the month to get yourself down to the gallery to take a look and surround yourself with one of the best collections of Pre-Raphaelite prints ever to be offered for sale.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established
in 1848; an era now referred to as the Year of Revolutions. It was the year in
which Louis Philippe abdicated from his throne, and the French Second Republic
was later declared. The Palermo rising erupted in Sicily, whilst Denmark and
Germany were rooted in conflict surrounding the Schleswig-Holstein Question.
Rebellion, however, was not restricted to the
continent, and London became something of a nucleus for it during this time. The
Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels was published in the capital and
serialised in the Deutsche Londoner
Zeitung. Kennington Common was also
the site of the Chartist demonstration as 150,000 people marched in support of
political reform. William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais were amongst the
protesters, and a month later, at the house of Millais’ parents in Bloomsbury,
they launched their movement. Like the year in which it was formed, the approach of
Pre-Raphaelitism to the world of art can be read in terms of revolution.
Though recent exhibitions and publications have
stressed the avant-garde aspects of the movement, their involvement in the
shifting climate of printmaking is seldom discussed. The Pre-Raphaelite’s
played an important role in the etching revival. They also contributed to the
burgeoning culture of book and magazine illustration, as copies of their works
were reproduced in Edward Moxon’s edition of Tennyson’s poems and the
evangelical periodical Good Words. Nonetheless, it was in the
advancements made to photographic reproduction in the latter half of the
nineteenth-century, and the Brotherhood’s endorsement of them, that truly
marked their innovation.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an early advocate of
this, and commissioned a daguerreotype of his painting The Girlhood of Mary in
1853. His act was exceedingly prophetic. Horace Vernet and Eugène
Delacroix opted to have works translated in Louis Daguerre’s native France a
few years prior, but Rossetti was amongst the first Englishmen to experiment
with the print, and in doing so, anticipated the flourishing of the medium in
the coming years. Although the daguerreotype became quickly outmoded, Rossetti
and the Pre-Raphaelites continued to subscribe to similar photographic devices.
Because of this, a mutually beneficial relationship arose between the method
and the movement.
The invention of photography, and the
reproductive potentials which came with it, radicalised the field of
printmaking. It allowed for greater quantities of images to be reproduced at increasing
speeds, whilst freeing publishers from the process of engraving. But herein lay
the problem. In his Dictionary of
Accepted Ideas, 1872, Gustave Flaubert inquired about the purpose of art
when it could be replaced by mechanical
processes which did the job faster and more exceptionally?
Art and photography were often viewed as separate entities. However, the symbiotic
relationship enjoyed by Pre-Raphaelitism and photgraphic reproduction acted to
dispel this notion.
Fidelity to nature was one of the foremost
doctrines of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. What was the use of Holman Hunt
fastidiously capturing the atmospheric effects upon the architecture of
Magdalen Tower (Page no. 20), if the detail would get lost in translation. The
Brotherhood understood that the photographic print, more than any other method,
could convey the physical qualities of painting, and in their continued
endorsement of the technique, they in turn legitimised the status of
photography as a fine art. The movement’s repeated employment of photogravure
is especially pertinent. The technique combined tradition and innovation, as
the gelatin tissue of the photographic negative was subjected to the etching
process. Quattrocento conventions were given an innovative twist. The parallels
to Pre-Raphaelitism are clear, but the results of the relationship are
spectacular.
Although on a much smaller scale than previous years there will still
be plenty bargains to be had, with up to 75% off selected prints,
reductions on framed stock and hundreds of prints from £1 to £5.
Subjects including Caricatures, Flora & Fauna, Portraits,
Topography, Decorative and many more. 
