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The Victorian Age (1830-1901)
Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dy ing?Typhoon Coming On),
J. M. W. Turner, 1840 The subject of Turner's painting?slaves thrown overboard, still in chains, as a storm approaches?is the occasion for apocalyptic use of light and color. For several years John Ruskin owned this painting, a gift from his father; but he later sold it, finding the subject 'too painful to live with.' While many contemporaries criticized the painting for what they saw as its extravagance, Ruskin praised iL as Turner's noblest work, in a passage from Modern Painters that is one of Ruskin's own finest passages of prose painting. BURSTEIN COLLECTION/ CORBIS.
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Ophelia, John Everett Millais, 1851-52
Millais's painting illustrates the lines from Hamlet (4.7.137-54) in which Gertrude describes Ophelia's drowning herself. Many of the individual plants and llowers?the pansies on her dress, the violets around her neck?derive from the queen's speech and Ophelia's mad scene (4.5.163?94). Like much Pre-Raphaelite art, the painting sets an erotic subject in the midst of photographically precise, symbolic detail. The model for the painting was Elizabeth Siddal (later to become Dante Gabriel Rossetti's wife), who posed for the picture in a warm bath. ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE, NY.
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Work, Ford Madox Brown, 1852, 1856-63
Brown's painting constructs a comprehensive picture of Victorian society through the relationships of various classes of the population to work. The excavators at the center represent work in its essential, physical form; the leisured gentry on horseback at the top of the painting have no need to work; the ragged girl in the foreground cares for her orphaned brothers and sisters. Under the trees are vagrants and distressed haymakers. Thomas Carlyle and
F. D. Maurice, 'brain workers' whose social ideas influenced the painting, stand on the right. MANCHESTER CITY ART GALLERY, MANCHESTER, UK.
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The Awakening Conscience, William Holman Hunt, 1853?54
Every detail of Hunt's painting of a fallen woman, hearing the voice of conscience while in the arms of her lover, has symbolic resonance?the soiled glove on the carpet, the bird that has escaped the cat, the songs on the piano ('Oft in the Stilly Night') and on the floor ('Tears, Idle Tears'), the window through which the woman gazes, reflected in the mirror behind the couple. Like Millais's Ophelia, the painting surrounds and interprets its subject with a crowded canvas of discrete, photographically rendered objects. TATE GALLERY, LONDON/ART RESOURCE, NY.
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Soul's Beauty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1864-70
Also titled Sibylla Palmifera (the palm-bearing sibyl), Soul's Beauty represents the
unattainable ideal that inspires the artist. Painted as a companion to the sonnet of the same name, the picture strives to represent and evoke
the erotic and aesthetic absorption the poem allegorizes.
Rossetti devoted the last fifteen years of his painting career to these looming frontal portraits with richly decorated
backgrounds, the details of which carry symbolic signifi
cance (in this painting, the
arch of life, the cupid, the poppies, the skull, the butter
flies). THE BOARD OF
TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL
MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES ON
MERSEYSIDE, LADY LEVER ART
GALLERY, LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND.
Body's Beauty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1864-73
Also titled Lady Lilith (after Adam's first wife, who ran away to become a witch), Body's Beaut)' represents sensual absorption. Paired with the sonnet of the same name, the painting associates the sexual allure of the woman at the center with the golden hair that represents her value, and her narcissistic contemplation of herself with the art that she embodies. Like the Lady of Shalott, Lady Lilith is a weaver, but a deadly one?the poppies and roses surrounding her link death and sexuality. DELAWARE ART MUSEUM, WILMINGTON, USA/SAMUEL AND MARY R. BANCROFT MEMORIAL/ BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY.
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The Beguiling of Merlin, Edward Burne-Jones, 1870-74
Burne-Jones draws on a medieval version of the Arthurian legend for this painting, in which Merlin's pupil, Nimue (also called Nimiane, Vivian, or Vivien), uses one of Merlin's own spells to imprison him in a hawthorn tree. The winding branches of the tree, echoed in the Medusa-like snakes of Nimue's hair, create a flat decorative surface. Although the
Nimue of the story is a femme fatale enchanting the helpless Merlin, her posture and expression and the simi
