Arthur Hughes, Ophelia, 1852.

Oil on canvas, 68.7 x 123.8 cm.

Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester.

 

 

This melancholy figure haunts me. I should like to solve the perplexing problem. Shall we try to find a new solution of the enigma? Princess and goddess, both have faded; and I am in the presence of the personification of modern Egypt. In the dull, black eyes, as frigid and lustreless as a lifeless coal; in the ominous stillness, and in these trappings suitable to a slave or a courtesan, I find a symbol of Egypt, deposed from the splendour of her ancient civilisation, fallen from her high, intellectual culture, with nothing left to her but what the fertility of soil, the waters of the Nile and bountiful nature continue to lavish upon her. Why does she turn her back to the river? Is it to avert her gaze from the colossal remains of her former power lying ruined on the banks? Steadfast and gloomy, she stands under the weight of the heavy corn; steadfast and lifeless as a block of granite; her life has sunk to an animal, vegetating existence, with perhaps, in the far depths of her soul, a sparkle, a gleam of her former state.

I will leave to my patient reader the task of finding other solutions of this problem, which may easily be done with a little imagination; and exactly therein lies the fault of this emblematic and ideal style of painting; it possesses the slight defect of being at times unintelligible, or, what comes to the same thing, it may bear as many contradictory interpretations as there are interpreters.

But in studying Hunt’s work, it is astonishing to mark the amount of detail that enters into his picture. Every tiny flower or grain of wheat, every feather on each bird as well as those fallen from their wings, each scale of their claws, the minutest lines of the woman’s face, the most insignificant details of the work, every part is carried out with patience, care, and finish which would challenge the finest and most delicate imagination of Lilliput. Here we see the most splendid, or most foolish, illustration of the principles so eloquently laid down by Ruskin. As I have already said, it is a system of microscopic analysis driven to the utmost extreme.

Do not imagine that this carrying out of detail, which appears to be so extravagant to us, was based on nothing more solid than a fancy of one of the heads of the school or a particular skill possessed by the artist; it is due to quite another cause, and, far from taking its rise from a whim or from simple dexterity, it is grounded on a very decided philosophical view. And really, so lofty is the aspiration, and so firm the conviction these painters entertain, that we have no right to treat the matter with any other than the utmost respect in criticising their views.

Its theory is governed by two ideas: a hatred of forms, appearances, and pretences, and a noble, passionate love of truth. They do not follow the Latin idea and think that an artist’s vocation is to please, but they look upon him as a man of higher ability than others, a prophet whose mission it is to set forth his own exalted revelations of nature’s manifestations which have been granted to him for this purpose.

To handle the brush freely, and to paint grass and weeds with enough accuracy to satisfy the eye, are accomplishments which a year or two’s practice will give any man; but to trace among the grass and weeds these mysteries of invention and combination by which nature appeals to the intellect; to render the delicate fissure, and descending curve, and undulating shadow of the mouldering soil, with gentle and fine finger, like the touch of the rain itself; to find even in all that appears most trifling or contemptible fresh evidence of the constant working of the Divine power ‘for glory and for beauty’ and to teach it and proclaim it to the unthinking and the unregarding; this, as it is the peculiar province and faculty of the mastermind, so it is the peculiar duty which is demanded of it by the Deity. (Modern Painters)

How remote this is from well-known and authorised theories of art! I do not pretend to justify it, for it wanders beyond the limits of art, but how it stirs one’s soul! How singularly the Pre-Raphaelites mingle the ideal with the real! For with their lofty ideas, they quite worship Truth.