Abstract
Revising the conventions of painting, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) reinvented several genres we might call familial—portraiture of friends, family and patrons or en famille, using narratives from literature, history, or mythology, as a familial history of a nation or culture, e.g., domesticating the childhood of religious or historical figures, and imaging issues, like marriage, or family members’ identities. They re-evaluated the bourgeois family, family rituals, and abject family figures. These artists made historical and literary identities metaphorically familial and national by turning their represented subject into narratives about Victorian family, nation, social class and adding psychological dimensions to their images. Through an uncanny doubling of models with mythic, literary or historical figures, artists intervened in cultural histories to expose how canons are formed and to radically revise and “genealogize” presumed origins of national culture, turning representation into narrative. These artists expanded the familial by putting lovers and family into historical, literary and mythic narratives. They invented their own antecedents or cultural patrimony, including Dante, Chaucer and the Romantic poets, among several acts of lineage making—Rossetti and Swinburne’s biography of Blake and William Michael Rossetti’s biography of Shelley. Blake and Keats were relatively unknown in 1848 when the PRB promoted their entrance into national literary history, while also claiming to be their cultural progeny. Their attention to early Italian and Flemish art and Hogarth did the same for art history’s still-emerging canon.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Pre-Raphaelites, Family, Narrative, Representation, History, Literature, Genealogy
