(no subject)

[liadnan]

The Lloyd-Webber collection of Pre-Raphaelite (And Other) Stuff was extremely good, but also extremely large. Part of the problem was that, presumably at Lloyd-Webber's behest, they showed the whole of his collection, the "Other Stuff", but I'll come to that.

So there was a room of stuff from the early days of the original PRB: Rossetti, Millais, Burne-Jones &c; another room entirely full of exceptionally good Rossettis; a couple of rooms devoted to Burne Jones; rooms devoted to "followers and inspired by"; a room for the classical lot like Leighton; and at the end a room of Waterhouses and similar things from the late period. And scattered throughout furniture, rugs and the like from Morris & Co, vases from DeMorgan etc etc. Actually the last deserves particular attention, it was good, and rare, to see in an exhibition artefacts other than paintings, drawings and sculpture that were obviously an integral part of the movement, and it's particularly appropriate to do so when looking at the PRB/Morris group of artists and artisans. And the DeMorgan things, about which I knew little, were stunning: I would pay an awful lot to own some of those vases if I could. As of course was the Morris furniture and the books from the Kelmscott Press (the git owns one of the thirteen surviving Kelmscott vellum Chaucers, one of the rarest of rare books, and an illustrated and illuminated Kelmscott Aeneid...), but they were somewhat more familiar to me.

And wandering through these things one is constantly amazed, thinking "oh, so that's where that is" (eg the Burne-Jones Morte d'Arthur tapestries, the ones that aren't in Birmingham), and recognizing pictures previously known only as Christmas cards. And all this is good, though one room in particular serves mainly to show that the followers of the PRB actually produced quite a lot of really quite rubbish paintings. (And Holman Hunt's work was just shit. All of it. Even a couple of the Rossettis resembled nothing as much as early 80s photographs from fashion magazines. I kid you not, Princess Di hair and all, in soft focus on a white background -chalk on paper, if I remember rightly). But most of the Rossettis and Burne-Jones were as brilliant as one would expect and some of the followers' work, particularly the landscape work, was almost as good.

In quite a lot of cases one could see the way in which they and their followers influenced later painters. One picture both K and I, on catching sight of it from the previous room, thought was a Sergeant: in fact it was more than 50 years older (it was by an Italian whose name I have forgotten, a full-length portrait of a beautiful contessa notorious in her day but whose name I have also, alas, forgot. Obviously the superficial fact that it was a full length, near life size image of a beautiful and dynamic woman dressed in black was partly responsible for the immediate thought "hey, a Sergeant" but closer inspection revealed more detailed similarities in style.

What didn't really work as well, as part of the exhibition, was the Other Stuff: random paintings, good in themselves but having little or nothing to do with Pre-Raphaelites, even in the most general sense. Towards the end of the collection one reached first a room containing most notably a Reubens and a Canaletto, and then in the next room various late 19th/early 20th century stuff including a rather good Picasso and a host of Stanley Spencers. Now I love Stanley Spencer, and one of his paintings in the collection was part of the Resurrection series, which is even better, but his relationship with the PRB is somewhat beyond my powers of comprehension.

Nevermind though. In the end, the big names alone were sufficient to make the exhibition worthwhile. Waterhouse in particular was someone who had never grabbed my attention before but did there.