PR SIsters at National Portrait Gallery

Scheduled for  October, Pre-Raphaelite Sisters opens a new window on the subject, looking at the actual women within and behind the art.  Those ‘stunners’ who inspired and modelled for the painted saints, heroines and courtesans.   Those women who painted alongside the more famous men.  Those who as wives and partners, studio assistants and household managers, participated invisibly in the making of Pre-Raphaelite art.

How did these women relate to the images?   What did they really look like? How did they become involved?  How did they fare?  What happened to them in later life?  The exhibition invites you to ponder, explore  and assess the creative contribution made by a dozen individuals in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, during the half-century to 1900.  It presents a wealth of art works, from the iconic to the unknown,  depicting women cast in dramatic roles and in portraits.   It reveals their own artistic ambitions and glimpses of their private lives.

In 1848, the year of European revolutions, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood [PRB] was launched by a group of young artists with the aim of challenging the tired conventions of the day through the rediscovery of  clarity, sincerity and moral feeling.  Over the years it evolved as an aesthetic endeavour, invoking imagined idealities inspired by legendary themes.

The fact that one can here write ‘young artists’ on the understanding that all were male is symptomatic both of the time and of virtually all art criticism.  In fact, women were also inspired by the aims of the PRB  - ‘a set of crazy poetical young men’, according to one young woman, who ‘are full of true feeling in spite of their craziness’ – and in response dreamt of creating  an ‘art sisterhood’ for mutual support.   This did not happen, but the sense of shared values created a circle linked by friendship and aspiration that extended to the next generation.  

One of the models featured is Fanny Cornforth aka Sarah Cox, Sarah Hughes and Sarah Schott,  about whom Kirsty Walker has written so sympathetically.  While other artists cast other models in the emerging Venetian style of mid-period Pre-Raphaelitism, Fanny can be credited with inaugurating the Rossettian version with Bocca Baciata, then with inspiring a whole sequence of courtesan images including the Blue Bower [top]. 

 Less familiar is the original [or at least an early] version of Lady Lilith, for some reason later reproduced as a colour lithograph, well after the large oil with Lilith's altered features had reached collector Samuel Bancroft in Delaware.

Advance booking for tickets to Pre-Raphaelite Sisters is now  available