Give Now
 
 

Tag Archives: Pre-Raphaelite

Object of the Month: February 2025

Head of Christ

Oil on panel, signed and dated lower right: A Scheffer 1849

Ary Scheffer

Dutch, active in France, 1795-1858

Ary Scheffer first studied art with his parents, later studying at the Amsterdam Drawing Academy. When his father died, Scheffer moved with his family to study in Paris with the neoclassical painter Pierre Guerin which set Scheffer on the road to Romanticism. A year later, he debuted at the Royal Academy’s Salon Exhibition. Five years after the move, he won his first medal which garnered him patronage by a supporter of the royal family.

The French would call this work an étude—a study made of a model to reference and work out details for a later painting. As such, collectors consider them valuable works. A glance at his oeuvre (body of work) reveals that Scheffer uses this model repeatedly for the Christ figure in several of his works largely during his religious period at the end of his career. Dated 1849, M&G’s study likely influenced later works, such as The Temptation of Christ (1854) in the National Gallery of Victoria and perhaps Christ Weeping over Jerusalem (1849) in the Victoria & Albert Museum (which he repeated in an 1851 version at the Walters Art Museum).

Scheffer’s popularity did extend to England but with a marked division in how the British received his works. The members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, just at the start of their own movement (1848), varied in their reactions: William Holman Hunt did not approve, unlike Thomas Woolner. In fact, Hunt convinced D.G. Rossetti that Scheffer’s works were “worthless” (Morris 180).

The Royal Academy in London criticized nearly all the technical aspects of his work, especially his coloring, possibly feeling vulnerable from the acclaim that he was receiving in the industrial North. The growth in the middle class through textile factories in cities such as Manchester and Liverpool made art collecting a mark of affluence and social status. These “barons” were already comfortable with Europe due to product exportation; the importation of ideas from there was a natural consequence. Scheffer was championed by the author Elizabeth Gaskell and collected by the “intensely pious John Heugh” (Morris 186). John Ruskin called him “one of the heads of the mud sentiment school,” but admitted that Scheffer “does draw and feel very beautifully and deeply” (Morris 180).

So if technical excellence was not the draw, what was? Edward Morris states that “it was above all spiritual and emotional exaltation particularly in expression that Scheffer’s English friends admired in his art” (176).  This Head of Christ evidences the coloring that drew criticism: the palette is limited to creams and browns with little distinction between Christ’s clothing and His skin. But Christ’s face is what draws attention. Kindness, introspection, firmness of purpose, along with a far-seeing gaze, create the impression that the God-man is on an eternal mission. “Emotional idealism” can easily cross the line into sentimentality, especially in religious works. However, the appeal to sentiment often leads to contemplation, a result that all artists desire. And anything more than a passing glance at Scheffer’s Head of Christ compels the viewer to ponder the Savior of the world.

 

Dr. Karen Rowe Jones, M&G board member

 

Work Cited:

Morris, Edward. French Art in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Yale UP, New Haven. 2005

 

Portrait of John Ruskin: John Everett Millais

Portrait of John Ruskin

John Everett Millais

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Below the image, click play to listen.

Two Angels with Banner

Two Angels with Banner

Unknown English, 19th Century

Below the image, click play to listen.

Frederic James Shields: The Pre-Raphaelites

Watch this video to learn how Dr. Karen Rowe “reads” one of the most intriguing works in our Museum & Gallery collection.

Johann Friedrich Overbeck

The Visitation

Johann Friedrich Overbeck

Below the image, click play to listen.

Object of the Month: September 2014

Patience

Oil on canvas

Frederic James Shields, A.R.W.S.

English, 1833-1911

Click on the links throughout the article to view additional artists’ works and reference material.

Frederic James Shields, the creator of this work, was one of many provincial artists to embrace the tenets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Like many artistic movements, the Brotherhood began with a small group of youthful idealists decrying the conventions of their day. The founding members, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt were a diverse set of friends with one thing in common—a genuine admiration for  “the immaculate purity of Pre-Renaissance art” (K. E. Sullivan). This passion, coupled with their growing disdain for London’s Royal Academy, motivated these young painters to set down four principles to govern their work.  These principles (or “declarations” as the young men labeled them) were:

  • To have genuine ideas to express;
  • To study Nature attentively;
  • To sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote; and
  • Most indispensible of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.

Time would mellow some of the Brotherhood’s youthful disdain (Millais later became President of the Royal Academy). More importantly, it would refine and extend the Pre-Raphaelite vision.

The famed Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition (1857) “awakened” the Victorian public to a wide range of artistic venues including Pre-Raphaelite art. It was at this exhibition that Frederic James Shields first encountered the meticulously executed, vibrantly colored canvases of Rossetti, Millais, and Hunt. Shields later studied with Rossetti, and the two became life-long friends. However, the rich detail and typological symbolism in works like Patience reveals that Shields’ artistic technique and iconography are more in tune with William Holman Hunt’s oeuvre. A comparison of the topological symbolism in Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd with Shields’ commentary on Patience illustrates some of the fascinating similarities between these two artists’ approach to subject and technique:

Set upon a sundial, her ankle chained thereto, her motions circumscribed with its time-measuring limit, stands Patience. Wings has she like a dove’s, but not till God shall loose her chain shall she fly away and be at rest.  Meanwhile she waits, crowned with thorns, with eyelids dropped as seeing things invisible, and lips, firm closed, like unto the Lamb of God, who brought to the slaughter, opened not His mouth.  Her once green garment is faded, stained and tattered with storm and wrack, and she is environed by sharp thorns and thistles, the thorns bearing still some lingering withered leaves of the past winter, and putting forth fresh green shoots (new woes fast on the heels of the old ones, and the thistle seeding to multiply yet more). She keeps pressed to her bosom the word of Christ’s patience, and bears His yoke, its noose around her neck.  Moreover, she carries a basketful of seed corn, and from her girded loins hangs a sickle (Frederic James Shields).

Donnalynn Hess. Director of Education

 

Published in 2014