The sims medieval bric a brac day
How had things got to this point? It was the largely Franco-centric tastemakers of the early 20th century who stuck the knife in. Just 37 years later, the picture re-emerged for auction at Christie’s – only this time, the painter’s currency had crashed, his subject matter so far out of fashion that it was sold for a paltry 32 guineas as an unattributed painting of “A maiden kneeling before a knight…”. The picture, imbued with a dreamlike atmosphere typical of Pre-Raphaelite art, was immediately snapped up by the reputable collector Sir Alexander Henderson. In 1905, at the height of his fame, Waterhouse painted Lamia, based on the Greek myth of a snakelike woman who would mesmerise men before sucking away their lifeblood.
One painting on show in the RA serves as a particularly eloquent illustration of the depths to which the artistic reputation of Waterhouse, and the PRB as a whole, once sank.
#The sims medieval bric a brac day free#
Set in mythical or literary pasts, populated by doomed lovers and femmes fatales, these sumptuous paintings were dismissed as irrelevant early in the 20th century, when modernism and Dadaism cut art free from representation.
But the absence of a major Waterhouse show until now reminds us how, somewhere along the way, Pre-Raphaelite art fell dramatically out of favour with the critical establishment. Waterhouse’s work has enormous popular appeal (his painting of The Lady of Shalott has for many years been Tate Britain’s best-selling postcard) and the recent high sales prices achieved (this month, Christie’s sold his sketch for The Magic Circle for £40,850 in April his Miranda fetched $746,500 in New York).
#The sims medieval bric a brac day series#
And, in what promises to be a bumper summer for Pre-Raphaelitism, the BBC is showing two new series dedicated to Millais, Hunt and Rossetti. This month, exactly 160 years on, The Royal Academy in London is mounting the first substantial exhibition of Waterhouse’s work since his death in 1917. In that same year, John William Waterhouse, the artist who would go on to represent the culmination of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, was born. In 1849, a radical group of artists calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, led by John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, took the British art world by storm.