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So, naturally enough, what they produce is mere "arty" anecdote. This, perhaps, is the secret of their success their success, I mean, with the cultivated public. Those terrible young fellows who were feared to be artists turn out after all to be innocent Pre-Raphaelites. They leave Burlington House without a stain upon their characters.
The works of Dubray, Triquetti, Yvon, Giraud, Gerome, Dubufe, Toulmouche, Courbet, Troyon, Rosa Bonheur and others exhibited the route toward the naturalistic taken by her modern school, so different from that pursued by the Pre-Raphaelites in England.
It was a pleasure to see her enjoying herself so much; and poppa and I vainly tried to keep up to her with the catalogue. "Oh, why haven't we such things in Chicago!" she exclaimed, at which the Senator checked her mildly. "It's a mere question of time," said he. "It isn't reasonable to expect Pre-Raphaelites in a new country.
The Pre-Raphaelites, on the other hand, endeavor to paint everything that they see just as they see it; and doing this without permitting the slightest liberty of choice to their feeling, where they have feeling, their Art is, of course, in all its early stages, destitute of that singleness of purpose which marked Turner's works from the beginning.
But more than this, the very faithfulness of the Pre-Raphaelites arises from the redundance of their imaginative power.
This is delightful, but childlike, nevertheless. Turner was, above all, an artist; with him Art stood first, facts secondary; with the Pre-Raphaelites it is the reverse; it is far less important to them that their facts should be broadly stated and in keeping in their pictures, than that they should be there and comprehensible.
The Roman soldiers who figured in those pages were huge firemen, a bequest from the schools of Guérin and David; and then, unexpectedly, in certain plates where the Magdalen and the Holy women appeared, a younger spirit seemed to prevail among the commonplace groups Greek female types derived from the Renaissance, pretty and elegant, evidently imported from the works of the pre-Raphaelites, and strongly recalling Walter Crane's illustrations.
At first I fear to pluck them, thinking they must be cultivated and valuable; but soon the banks show a long line of thick tall shrubs, one mass of glorious pink and green, set there in a little valley, whose rocks gleam out blue and purple colours, such as pre-Raphaelites only dare attempt, shining out hard and weird-like amongst the clumps of castor-oil plants, cistus, arbor-vitae, and many other evergreens, whose names, alas!
It was the one thing that the modern Pre-raphaelites could not imitate in the real Pre-raphaelites. Burne-Jones could never recover the deep levity of the Middle Ages. In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens.
Though the artistic movement inaugurated years before by the Pre-Raphaelites was still laughed at and scorned by the many as a craze, a few had stood firm, and slowly the steadfast minority had begun to sway the majority as is often the case in democracies. Oscar Wilde profited by the victory of these art-loving forerunners.
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