Brothers - and Sisters, too!

Saw the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at The Tate yesterday afternoon.  Fabulous.  Although I've seen a lot of the items on display many times in the past, they remain breathtakingly beautiful: the talent and the work is just exquisite.  An added bonus was having the chance to see some items I'd never seen, including a range of sketches by Lizzie Siddal and quite a number of paintings by Millais I've not seen outside of books before - or at all - many of which were quite breath-takingly lovely.  Surprisingly (for me) the one that seems to have stuck in my memory the most was a landscape of his: Chill October.  I suppose, really, I'm a greater fan of the Aesthetic Movement than I am of the works of the Brotherhood themselves.  Much of what has been seen as being Millais more commercial work - Bubbles, The Childhood of Raleigh - leaves me cold.  I know he was acclaimed for his paintings of children but I find them too cloyingly sweet, too 'of their era' for my tastes.  However, there were a great number of his works in this exhibition, some that quite definitely prefigure The Aesthetic Movement.  And there are still a great many of his works I've yet to see.  I'd love to see his 'Twins', two young women (twins) but I think it's probably in a private collection (lucky owner!).  Still, several of the greatest Pre Raphaelite works are owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber and he's very generous in lending them to exhibitions so maybe there's hope yet.

But back to this exhibition at Tate Britain: I liked the fact that it wasn't limited to simply paintings and drawings, but included photographs, sculpture, furniture, textiles, pottery, tiles and stained glass (Burne-Jones of course!).  Did the exhibition achieve its stated aim to show that the Brotherhood was a wildly avant garde movement that influenced art at home and abroad more profoundly than most people have hitherto realised?  I'm probably not the best judge, given that I've recognised for a long time, albeit unconsciously, how very different they were, in terms of British art, from that which had gone before.  I hope the exhibition managed to show that to at least some people.  It certainly made the case for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood having influenced many of the 20th century's greatest artists and taught me something I hadn't appreciated: that Picasso owed a debt to the PRB!