Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.
My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
Ophelia, by John Everett Millais, is the artist's vision of the drowned dame who was rejected by Hamlet.
The founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were the first bad boys of modern Britain.
Beginning as a pact between young classically-trained art students in the heat of the Industrial Revolution, the Brotherhood grew into an art movement that rejected the mechanical aesthetics of the time and made its goal to reform art through a naturalistic and spiritual approach. The three founding members--John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt--believed in particular that the exaggerated Mannerist style that succeeded the High Renaissance art of Raphael and Michelangelo had a corrupting influence on the development of art, and sought to restore it to its "pre-Raphaelite" form.
The Pre-Raphaelites would eventually become known as the first avant-garde movement in Britain. A gorgeous new exhibit of their work, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848-1900, docked recently at the National Gallery of Art after making its way from London's Tate Gallery (in June, it will head to Moscow's Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts). It features around 130 paintings, including Millais' infamous Ophelia, and stunning examples of decorative arts for which the pre-Raphaelites are less known, including rich textiles with designs of native British plants and flowers, finely carved book plates, and stained glass techniques that the Pre-Raphaelites revived from the Middle Ages.
Pre-Raphaelite textile design.
A good exhibit should have good accompanying information, and the NGA outdid itself in this regard. Brief and informative texts illuminate the significance of each work, tracing its origins in the Pre-Raphaelites' fascination with Gothic and medieval settings, Shakespearean subject matter, early English poetry (especially Tennyson, Chaucer, Milton, Byron and Pope), and the notions of chivalrous love. The lush landscapes that round off the exhibit--another often-overlooked part of the Pre-Raphaelites' repertoire--display the group's earnest dedication to John Ruskin's idea of direct and realistic transcription of nature. This "directness of vision" becomes almost blinding in their intense portrayal of sunlit fields and lush, verdant forests.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, self portrait (1847).
Having been mostly unimpressed with the Pre-Raphaelite art that I've seen in books or on the computer screen, I was stunned by its appeal in real life: the brilliant colors, with the translucency of a butterfly wing, the meticulously detailed background scenes, the nymph-like women. It's all luxurious, poetic, and terribly romantic. The men of the Brotherhood (and one woman, Elizabeth Siddall, the artists' muse and love interest who died at age 32) have a mysterious appeal of their own. Perhaps it stems from the futility of what they were trying to do in throwing themselves against the spokes of the industrial revolution in hopes of halting the destruction of a more beautiful, naive way of life. And it doesn't hurt that Dante Gabriel Rossetti, widely seen as the group's leader, was by all accounts a total babe.
Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1866-68), with a verse from Goethe's Faust as translated by Shelley attached to the frame:
"Beware of her fair hair, for she excells All women in the magic of her locks, And when she twines them round a young man's neck, she will not ever set him free again."
Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1870), evoking a heroine from Dante Alighieri's poem, La Vita Nuova.
Mariana by John Everett Millais (1851), from am 1830 Tennyson poem of the same name:
She only said, 'My life is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'
Monna Vanna by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1866).
April Love by Arthur Hughes (1855).
Vanity by Frank Cadogan Cowper (1907).
Aspargus Island by William Homan Hunt.
The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt.
And here's a cool promo video of the exhibit, courtesy of the Tate:
