Modern Pre-Raphaelite Visionaries

 

Simeon Solomon, The Sleepers and one that Watcheth, 1871

RATHER a mouthful for the temporary exhibition at Leamington Spa art gallery [moving on to Watts Gallery in some form],  chiefly because there’s no commonly used term for this brand of late Romantic painting in British Art 1880-1930 – the show’s more comprehensible sub-title.

The actual date range is even wider. Some exhibits are well-known: Rossetti’s 1864 Roman de la Rose; Simeon Solomon’s 1870 Sleepers and one that Waketh; Dicksee’s 1877 Harmony;   Thomas Gotch’s 1896 Alleluia; Evelyn de Morgan’s undated Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund.   

Most however are unknown or new to public view and assessment.  Frederick Cayley Robinson, who is the chief focus, is hardly known even to historians.  Together the exhibition and its catalogue – both the work of Alice Eden – aim to position him in the interstitial space between 19^th and 20^th century fantasy.    The focus is on mystery and enigma, which frequently arises from Robinson’s titles.   The Foundling, for instance, is a fairly standard bedtime scene, where the child has fallen asleep by firelight and her mother lifts the coverlet prior to helping her into bed.  But why ‘foundling’?  the term sets the viewer hunting for cryptic clues to the girl’s origin. Is the bandage on her bare foot meaningful?

The Close of the Day is not dissimilar, especially in view of its candlelit illumination, with three young women around a dim table with an open musical box, a folio volume of  something like an illustrated periodical and a devotional painting hard up against a darkening window.  The commentary quotes a contemporary account of Robinson’s atmospheres – ‘something is portending’ but we don’t know what.

Puvis de Chavannes, Odilin Redon, Fernand  Knopff and the Glasgow ‘Spook School’ all portend: twilights, liminal spaces, dreamscapes, inaudible melodies feature in these artworks, by artists trained in accurate drawing of observable objects and figures.

A major inclusion are Robinson’s five crepuscular designs for Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird, which in its pre-1914 day eclipsed Peter Pan as a theatrical ‘must-see’.  The Forest is especially resonant.  

It links also to the Leamington cover-choice, Robinson’s In a Wood So Green, where an aureoled St George rides through a forest of slim birches oblivious of the sorrowing Princess whom he should surely be saving. A good few stories can be inspired by this impenetrable piece.

I haven't yet seen the installation, so I am going mainly on the catalogue, with its significant contributions from Colin Cruise, Liz Prettejohn, Tim Barringer, Sarah Victoria Turner and Charlotte Gere, so deserves to be taken seriously in its scholarly approach to neglected fields.  It’s now over a century since Robinson and coevals were considered worthy, so they merit an overdue revival and revaluation – indeed, a first evaluation, having been ignored for so long.