John Everett Millais and the Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia

Ophelia was the tragic heroine in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet and a popular subject 19^th in century painting.  Typically Ophelia is shown sitting by the brook where she drowned wearing a long white dress.  Ophelia had gone mad after her potential husband, King Hamlet of Denmark, killed her beloved father Polonius.  In the play it is unknown whether she accidentally fell in the brook or purposely drowned herself.

Ophelia, John Everett Millais, 1852, Tate Britain

In the 1852 version by John Everett Millais she has already died. Millais was one of the founding members of the short lived but influential group of 19th century painters known as the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” which also included Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt.  The group was revolutionary in its time (it was founded in 1848) as they always painted each exact detail from life and nature, unlike many painters they did not seek to idealize their subjects.  The group sought inspiration from Medieval and early Renaissance sources and emulated those artists up until the time of Raphael (around 1520). 

One reason that Ophelia was a popular theme is that it fit in with the aims of the group and-

"embodied the Brotherhood's initial aims in their keen observation of the natural world and depiction of subjects that lead the viewer to contemplate moral issues of justice, piety, familial relationships, and the struggle of purity against corruption."**

The Pre-Raphaelites have always intrigued me, I admire their work but their personal lives were even more interesting; the lives of the artists, their families, models and patrons are woven together and then unfold like an epic soap opera.  Part of this story can be told in one of the most impressive paintings, Ophelia.

Millais painstakingly made studies of all the components of the painting before pulling them together into one work.  He spent hours sketching and painting outdoors to capture each detail of the plants, trees and water.  Millais worked on this painting for nearly a year and for Ophelia he used a professional model named Elizabeth “Lizzie” Siddal who was a frequent muse of the Pre-Raphaelites. 

Ophelia, (detail) John Everett Millais, 1852, Tate Britain

Millais had Siddal pose in a tub of water to correctly capture how her hair and dress would have floated.  Each time she posed he kept the tub of water warm with many oil lamps, and on one instance failed to notice when they went out as he was so immersed in his painting.  She didn’t tell him when the water cooled so as not to break her pose but ended up getting pneumonia.  Her father was enraged to hear of this but Millais paid for a doctor.  Siddal continued to model for the group, eventually marrying Rossetti in 1860.

This painting was critically acclaimed but earlier Pre-Raphaelite paintings were ridiculed.  The prominent British art critic, art historian and author, John Ruskin was among those that praised the naturalism of the group from the start.  The same naturalism was used in a portrait of Ruskin also painted by Millais (below).  Millais was invited along on the family's vacation in Scotland so that he could paint Ruskin's full length portrait in the Pre-Raphaelite manner.  Millais spent hours outside sketching and painting the rocks and the water, and when they returned to London he had Ruskin continue his pose by placing him at the top of a staircase.

However one strange twist in the Pre-Raphaelite story took place on the very trip to Scotland where this portrait was painted.  The artist Millais noticed that the relationship between Ruskin and his wife seemed tense and strained.  At that time Ruskin’s young wife Euphemia “Effie” Ruskin, who had been married to him for over 5 years confided in Millais that her marriage had never been consummated.  She and Millais had become good friends over the years and she even modeled for him on occasion.  Her disclosure led to their eventual annulment in 1854 and in 1855 she married Millais.

John Ruskin, John Everett Millais, 1853-54, Private collection

Especially in Victorian England this caused a huge scandal and also a great deal of embarrassment to all parties.  Ruskin was looked on with pity, Effie was looked at as an unfaithful spouse and Millais was seen as breaking up a marriage.  However it does seem that they were both relieved to get an annulment, Effie and John Everett Millais went on to have a long happy marriage with eight children.  Ruskin did not remarry but after this incident he continued to have a successful and influential career as a writer and art critic.  

Ruskin's friendship with another of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, led to his great interest in the work of Rossetti’s fiancé, who was Lizzie Siddal (the model for Ophelia).  Siddal had been working in a millinery shop when a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites met her and asked her to model.  After working as an artist's model for a few years Siddal had started to become interested in pursuing art.  After she became engaged to Rossetti, he taught and encouraged her and she made dozens of paintings.  Ruskin was so impressed with her work that he bought all of it and paid for her expenses for the next few years.  Ruskin’s patronage allowed her to stop modeling and support herself so that she would be free to continue to paint full time.

Beata Beatrix, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1864-1870, Tate Britain

Ruskin also paid for her to travel to Paris and then to the south of France to benefit her health as she was often ill.  Her doctor had prescribed the very addictive and potentially fatal tonic of laudanum, which was a narcotic drug.  After Siddal and Rossetti married in 1860 she quickly became pregnant.  However she didn’t realize how dangerous it was to take laudanum throughout the pregnancy.  

This had extremely tragic results, she gave birth to a still born child and several months later she was found dead in their home due to a laudanum overdose in 1862.  In a heartbreaking case of life imitating art, (as the heroine Ophelia that she is so often associated with) it is unknown whether she accidentally overdosed on the drug or purposely killed herself due to her grief. Rossetti was beside himself with anguish and painted this memorial to his wife Lizzie, Beata Beatrix, a title which referenced Beatrice Portinari, the beloved of the Renaissance poet after whom he was named, Dante Alighieri. 

**Source of quote: The Pre-Raphaelites | Thematic Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Further reading:

Hawksley, Lucinda. Lizzie Siddal: Face of the Pre-Raphaelites. New York: Walker & Co., 2004.

Marsh, Jan. Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. London: The Cromwell Press, 1985.

Leonardo, Michelangelo and the Renaissance Cartoon

In Italian the word for paper is carta and the suffix "–one" means large, the “cartone” was a very large sheet of paper.  These cartone or cartoons as we have come to call them were specifically: large and very detailed drawings used to create paintings and frescoes.  These differed from sketches or studies in that they were the same size as the intended painting and were created to transfer the image.

The drawings were made to transfer the images to the painting surface in one of two ways.  In the first the cartoon acted as a type of stencil, thousands of small holes pricked the edges of each line and a bag of charcoal dust was “pounced” upon the cartoon.  In the second the cartoon acted as carbon paper, the back of the image was coated with charcoal dust and the image was carefully traced.  Since either process was messy and damaged the original paper, very few of these survive.  Those that remain were typically created for paintings that weren’t executed.

Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and John the Baptist, Leonardo da Vinci, 1499-1500,

The National Gallery (London) 

charcoal and white chalk on paper, perhaps with a brown wash, 4’6” x 3’4” (141.5 x 104.6 cm)

Leonardo did paint a version of his Virgin and Child with St Anne and John the Baptist, which today is in the Louvre, but it does differ from this drawing.  This particular cartoon has survived remarkably intact and is an astonishingly beautiful work of art.  Today this is at The National Gallery in London and it may be one of the most incredible works of art I have seen in person.  I have always felt that the few paintings that Leonardo made simply glow and outshine every other work which is in their presence in a museum setting, even if those works are masterpieces as well.  His cartoon may even outshine his paintings, using only charcoal and white chalk on paper (perhaps with a brown ink wash) he manages to create an illusion of depth and convey emotion.  Look at the image closely and you can see that he used very few lines and used the combination of charcoal and chalk to bring his method of chiaroscuro (modeling form with lights and darks) to the drawing.  When it was seen by other artists, they were amazed that he was able to fit several life-size figures in a cartoon which was only 4'5" x 3'4'.  This was due to the fact that the figures were all sitting, it provided inspiration for generations of artists.

The 16^th century artist and writer, Giorgio Vasari wrote a book, The Lives of the Artists (called originally The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects) which was published in 1550 and updated several years later.  This book included a biography and historical account for dozens of Renaissance artists.  His book is still used as an important source for art historical research today and in his chapter on Leonardo he writes of this cartoon when it was on public display in Florence in 1501:

“Once completed and set up in a room, brought men, women, young and old to see it for two days as if they were going to a solemn festival in order to gaze upon the marvels of Leonardo which stupefied the entire populace.”*

Epifania, Michelangelo Buonarroti,1550-53,

The British Museum, black chalk on twenty-six sheets of paper, 7’6” x 5’4”

Michelangelo sadly burned many of his preparatory drawings and sketches so that he wouldn’t share his techniques and process with others and also so that people would think he was divinely inspired and not see any work that didn’t measure up to his standards.  However Michelangelo had extremely high and probably unrealistic expectations for his work, even his small sketches show his artistic genius. There are only two surviving cartoons from him and the Epifania is one of them.  This work, done on a large scale is over seven feet high and was created on twenty six sheets of paper.  Cartoons were often done on separate sheets of paper or the originals were cut up to make the transfer process easier. The Epifania was drawn for a project that was never created and the actual subject of the cartoon is unknown.

Let’s compare and contrast the two cartoons: Michelangelo’s cartoon has a greater level of detail in the drawing but he doesn’t use the same level of chiaroscuro that Leonardo’s cartoon had.  Unlike Leonardo's cartoon he has focused less on the emotion between the figures and more on anatomy.

After the fresco lost its popularity in the 16^th century and painters frequently drew directly on their canvases this style of Renaissance cartoon fell out of use.  Over the next century the word cartoon took on its modern meaning of another type of drawing, frequently used in political satire and later as illustrations.

*Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of the Artists. Translated from Italian by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Origins of the Art Museum

It is hard for me to imagine a world without art museums, but they are in fact a fairly modern concept.  Most art collections were either owned by royalty or the extremely wealthy and were not available to the general public.  July 14 is Bastille Day, the day that the French Revolution began in 1789.  The enormous Louvre palace, which was only one of King Louis XVI's palaces, contained a vast royal art collection: thousands of paintings, drawings, sculptures and decorative arts from across the globe and dating back centuries.  This was turned into a public art museum less than one month after the French Revolution began, making it one of the earliest art museums.  However the Art Academy had been located in the Louvre for approximately a century prior and displayed art publicly at the annual Salons.  Today the Louvre is one of the largest art museums in the world. 

View of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, Hubert Robert, 1796, Louvre

However the Louvre wasn’t the first art museum that was open to the public. There were at least two in the 17^th century, the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, originally a private collection, opened to the public in 1671 and the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University opened in 1683 as the first university art museum, though both were considerably smaller in size than the Louvre. 

Before the 20th century art museums looked quite different then today's museums.  Notice the cluttered layouts of art in the two paintings, museums walls were absolutely packed with art hung in what is today known as the "salon style" layout, hung in several horizontal rows.  Some items would have been identified for the viewer but not all, and it was much harder for the viewer to appreciate an individual painting.

The Tribuna of the Uffizi, Johann Zoffany, 1772-78, Royal Collection,Windsor Castle

In Florence, Italy the administrative offices of the ruling Medici family in would later become the Uffizi (the word for offices in Italian) which contained their large private art collection.

In the 16^th century the artist and architect Buontalenti designed the first gallery in the building, the Tribuna of the Uffizi.  The gallery had been open to visitors by request  and was considered a highlight of the Grand Tour, the trip taken by aristocrats through continental Europe.  This contained many famous Renaissance paintings and ancient sculptures.  The well known painting by Zoffany, The Tribuna of the Uffizi (above) shows how the gallery looked at the time and included portraits of the actual visitors.  He painted this work for the King and Queen of England since they were unable to visit and see it for themselves.  It is an interesting work which contains paintings within a painting.  In 1765 after the Medici family was no longer in power, the entire building was opened to the public as a state art museum, the Uffizi Gallery.

Laocoön, Roman copy from 1st c. AD after 2nd c. BC Hellenistic original, Vatican Museums

Another prototype of an art museum which was visited on the Grand Tour was the Pio-Clementino Vatican museum which opened in 1771.  This was the joint project of two Popes: Clement XIV and Pius VI (which is why it was named Pio-Clementino).  The work housed in this museum had been collected since Pope Julius II first purchased the Laocoön sculpture after it was uncovered in 1506 (I discussed that sculpture in a post last week).  The Pio-Clementino also housed several other famous Greco-Roman sculptures including Apollo Belvedere and Sleeping Ariadne as well as many Renaissance paintings.  Later the Pio-Clementino expanded to the current Vatican Museums (follow the link to learn more of the history on their website).

Another important early museum was the British Museum in London, which opened to the public in 1759. This was the personal collection of archaeological artifacts of Sir Hans Sloane.  When it opened it was both an art museum and a library and also contained many important items pertaining to science, history and anthropology. All of these museums still exist today, and along with thousands of others they continue to enrich our lives with art.