Victor: Victorians

The successful artists of Victorian Britain basked in fame and fortune. Far from the cliched image of penniless painters desperate for patrons, most earned fees matched nowhere else in the 19th century. Few societies have ever honored their artists so well. But after their deaths, the 20th century did not treat the Victorian artists with kindness. Their reputations withered under scorn and neglect.

The Victorian Age struck the modern world as stuffy, hypocritical, ornate and boring. Victorian art was so ignored that one of its most prized works--”Flaming June” by Frederic Leighton, a painter so renowned in his day that the queen made him a lord--was found on sale in the stall of a Chelsea flea market in London in 1963 for 50 pounds (the equivalent that year of $140).

Since then, there has been a swelling revival of market interest in the art painted and admired by the Victorians. “Flaming June,” owned by the Luis A. Ferre Foundation of Ponce in Puerto Rico, is valued in the millions of dollars.

In fact, this portrait of a sensuous sleeping woman draped in undulating folds of pink material is the featured work on the posters for an unprecedented exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The exhibition, called “The Victorians: British Painting in the Reign of Queen Victoria, 1837-1901,” is the first major survey exhibition of Victorian art ever shown in the United States. Washington is the only venue: The exhibition, which opened Feb. 16 and closes May 11, shows nowhere else in the world.

The 68 paintings, most from British collections, are regarded as the finest paintings produced in Victorian Britain.

“Victorian art is not an easy sell,” said Malcolm Warner, the curator of paintings and sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art, in a recent interview. “People have all kinds of prejudice against things Victorian. We had to have real knock-down masterpieces. We had to have the best of Victorian art.”

Not all the artists are British; Americans John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler, Frenchman James Tissot and German Franz Xavier Winterhalter are included. But all painted in Britain and shared the mood of these Victorian times.

Warner, the curator of European art at the San Diego Museum of Art until last November, organized the exhibition with Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., the curator of American and British paintings at the National Gallery.

The 43-year-old Warner, part of a younger generation of British art historians rediscovering Victorian art, first came upon these painters in a book in a public library when he was a schoolboy. He soon found his attention fixed on an early group of Victorians with the strange name of Pre-Raphaelites.

“I loved the symbols,” he said. “There was more to a painting than what you actually saw. Every object had a secret meaning. I love that kind of puzzle solving.”

This fascination infuses the exhibition catalog, a model of clarity and narration that fixes the artists and their paintings in the sweep of the extraordinary Victorian era. It was written by Warner.

In the 63 years that Victoria reigned as queen, Britain was the richest and mightiest nation on Earth, its wealth and strength powered by the Industrial Revolution. Historian and critic Thomas Carlyle called those years “the Age of Machinery . . . the age which . . . forwards, teaches and practices the great art of adapting means to ends.”

A new class of rich industrialists and businessmen dominated smoke-belching cities and flaunted an eagerness to pay high prices for art to adorn their homes and embellish their reputations. Since they knew little about the Old Masters, whether Italian, Dutch, Spanish or even British, they bought contemporary art produced nearby.

British contemporary artists were in a somewhat rebellious mood then. Three young painters--Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt--founded a movement in 1848 that they called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They wanted to break from the idealized, grand manner of traditional British artists who painted people and their surroundings with more nobility and elegance than warranted by reality.

Insisting that this type of painting had started with Italian Renaissance master Raphael, the rebels argued that artists should return to earlier days when painters did not idealize. That is why they called themselves Pre-Raphaelites.

Rossetti, Millais, Hunt and their followers wanted their paintings to reflect the real world, showing it neither more beautiful nor more ugly than it was.

“Pre-Raphaelism has but one principle,” wrote art critic John Ruskin, their booster, “that of absolute, uncompromising truth in all that it does, obtained by working everything down to the most minute detail, from nature, and from nature only.” Hunt even made four lengthy trips to Jerusalem so that the background to his religious paintings would be authentic.

The paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites tended to be crammed with details all displayed colorfully under the same light, usually telling a story or drawing some kind of moral.

All the tenets of the Pre-Raphaelite ideology show up in the exhibition in Millais’ “The Blind Girl” (1854-56). In sharp focus, Millais painted every detail in the landscape that the girl could not see--every flower, every cow, almost every blade of grass--and he added a double rainbow to symbolize the hope of vision in the afterlife. Millais wrote that the rainbow was “a sign of Divine promise specially significant to the blind.”

As Warner points out in the catalog, the canvas was far more than a painterly exercise for Millais. He wanted to illustrate a sore social problem of the Victorian age: the vagrancy of children and the blind.

In the last decades of Queen Victoria’s reign, after 1870, a reaction set in. Much like the United States in the last years of the 20th century, Britain, though still the most powerful country on Earth, felt threatened by competitors, especially in commerce.

On top of this, the new currents of science, especially Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, seemed to challenge religious faith. Scientist Thomas Henry Huxley, coining the term “agnosticism,” argued that there was no way of knowing whether God existed.

In an uncertain world, artists began to preach faith in what they believed was certain: the beauty of art. Critic Walter Pater wrote that the meaning of life lay in “the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake.”

Instead of depicting scenes of everyday life and social realism--like William Maw Egley’s “Omnibus Life in London” and Samuel Luke Fildes’ “Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward” in the exhibition--the new painters wanted to produce art for art’s sake. Rather than capture life as it is, they wanted the beauty of art to divert the public from the meanness of life.

To make it clear that their paintings did not tell a story, some of these artists likened their works to musical compositions. Whistler even titled his paintings symphonies, nocturnes, harmonies and arrangements. He called his wonderful portrait of Thomas Carlyle “Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2.”

These later Victorians looked on the well-formed female face as the epitome of aesthetic pleasure, and their canvases are replete with languid, sensual, expressionless women of great beauty like Lord Leighton’s Flaming June.

As the poverty and grime of the Industrial Revolution deepened, Victorians began to yearn for pre-industrial times.

“Never has there been such self-consciousness and regret about the present, such a hunger for guidance from the past, such a casting around for different period styles and settings, as there was in Victorian Britain,” Warner writes in the catalog.

Artists reflected this nostalgia in mainly two ways: by painting scenes from the Middle Ages, an era of no-nonsense faith, and by painting landscapes of nature, a reminder of pre-industrial rural Britain.

But no matter what the subject matter, no matter what the ideology, whether Pre-Raphaelism or art for art’s sake, most Victorian artists painted with a sharpness and brightness far different from the style of the Impressionists who were working across the English Channel in France.

The British looked down on the new currents in France.

“British artists could not see the point of a kind of art that was so unconnected with the problems and issues involved in living in the modern world,” Warner said in the interview. “They believed that a concern about what shadows were like on snow was not enough to justify a work of art. That’s even true of the art-for-art’s-sake painters. It’s very hard to find a British painting that does not have at least symbolic meaning, even when they say it doesn’t.”

Edward Burne-Jones, a British painter who specialized in dreamlike scenes from legends of the past, belittled French techniques, saying, “They don’t make beauty, they don’t make design, they don’t make idea, they don’t make anything else but atmosphere, and I don’t think that’s enough--I don’t think it’s very much.”

The British Victorian painters would be astonished to discover a century later that the paintings of the French Impressionists are the most popular and expensive of modern times while their own work is so little known.

Evidence of their own revival, however, is mounting. Just two weeks before the opening of the show at the National Gallery of Art, Warner, watching the weekly “Mystery!” program on PBS, found Inspector Morse of Oxford, England, examining a postcard with a reproduction of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, “The Woodman’s Daughter” by Millais.

The inspector (played by British actor John Thaw) then read from a catalog of a 1984 exhibition at London’s Tate Gallery. The entry, a description of the Millais painting, persuaded Morse that he would find the body of a missing girl in the very place that Millais had painted the canvas, Wytham Woods near Oxford.

“I wrote the bit that he read,” an excited Warner said afterward. “That was one of the great moments of my life. I had written the Millais bits in the catalog. I felt as if I had played a part in solving the mystery.”

Warner guessed that the pivotal role of Victorian art on so popular a television show would surely boost attendance at his exhibition. But, although there are eight paintings by Millais in the exhibition, “The Woodman’s Daughter” is not one of them.

“I’d have put it in if I had known that it would be featured on ‘Mystery!’ ” Warner said with a laugh.

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* “The Victorians: British Painting in the Reign of Queen Victoria, 1837-1901,” National Gallery of Art, 4th Street at Constitution Avenue N.W., Washington. Mondays to Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Through May 11. Admission is free. (202) 737-4215.