Room for the garish and for the stunning

As far as the influential 19th century British critic John Ruskin was concerned, there was little hope for you if you didn’t admire the Pre-Raphaelites. Among spectators, he wrote, “none but the ignorant could be unconscious of [the art’s] truth and none but the insincere regardless of it.” If you aspired to make art yourself but were not a fan of the Pre-Raphaelites, you possessed “no capacity of becoming a great painter of any kind.”

Ruskin’s daunting assessment aside, the art of the Pre-Raphaelites isn’t for everyone. It can veer precipitously toward the sentimental and melodramatic, the treacly and trite. It can feel emotionally overwrought. But at its best -- and to those open to its formidable charms -- it abounds with beauty, sincerity and intellectual integrity.

There might even be enough knee-weakening gems in the exhibition “Waking Dreams: The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites From the Delaware Art Museum,” now ending a two-year U.S. tour at the San Diego Museum of Art, to convert the resistant. One picture alone, Frederick Sandys’ “Mary Magdalene” (c.1859), is worth the trip.

The painting exemplifies the way Pre-Raphaelite artists handled paint with great technical exactitude as they gravitated toward biblical, mythical and literary themes, infusing them with a contemporary, local sense of immediacy. Mary has a delicate English-rose complexion and long auburn hair that gleams against the background’s deep emerald patterning, reminiscent of both a medieval tapestry and the later wallpaper designs of William Morris. Clasping a small jar of anointing oil to her chest, she exudes determination but wears an expression of remote interiority, as if lost in a waking dream. The painting is also compelling for introducing a talent not commonly included in the Pre-Raphaelite pantheon.

The exhibition, which contains 130 paintings, drawings, prints and works of jewelry and decorative art, stems from the collection of a single, unusually driven patron, American textile manufacturer Samuel Bancroft Jr. (1840-1915). As such, its contents reflect personal passions and market availability more than they give a cohesive, comprehensive account of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Still, Bancroft’s chief fixation was also the movement’s leading light: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who launched the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt (represented in the show by one gorgeous if somewhat kitschy painting), John Everett Millais (represented by a fine landscape study and a small, gripping portrait) and several others.

The PRB (only slightly less sensationalistic in its day than its successor a century and a half later, the YBA, or Young British Artists) revolted against what it saw as the stagnation of the art of its time. Education at the Royal Academy meant emulating the old masters and developing a grand style based on the idealization of human subjects as well as nature.

Inspired by early Christian art of the medieval era, preceding the time of Raphael, the Pre-Raphaelites favored working from life. But their work was as steeped in literary as in artistic tradition; they found inspiration in Chaucer, Arthurian legend and the writings of Dante and Boccaccio.

Although they chafed at the conventions they had been taught, in time adherents of the Pre-Raphaelite creed inevitably established conventions of their own, tendencies they considered more emotionally authentic. “I shut myself in with my soul,” Rossetti said of his process, “and the shapes come eddying forth.”

His “Lady Lilith” (1866-68, later altered) pictures the woman known in Jewish folklore as Adam’s original mate as a self-possessed, self-absorbed beauty combing out her thick, coppery tresses. Serious, sensuous and dreamy, the portrait is quintessential Rossetti, the subject’s heavy-lidded hazel eyes, full cherry lips and porcelain skin epitomizing the Pre-Raphaelite look.

Portraits of a few other “stunners,” as the Pre-Raphaelite models/mistresses/wives came to be called, are stunners themselves.

In “Water Willow” (1871), a quieter piece by Rossetti, his lover Jane Morris merges poignantly with sprigs of foliage, the idyllic riverside village of Kelmscott unfolding behind her.

Ruskin criticized the Pre-Raphaelites’ chosen name as unfortunate, unwise, even ludicrous. It remains a confusing catch-all for an artistic manner that was practiced at first by a self-declared brotherhood, was melded into a broader Gothic revival in the 1850s and ‘60s and was then further diffused into mainstream British culture.

How well the principles of the movement manifest themselves in the show’s biscuit boxes, muffin dishes and tobacco jars -- or in later, quite peripheral watercolor landscapes by Walter Crane and a small illustration by Kate Greenaway -- is debatable. Such curious filler dilutes the exhibition’s strength but can’t diminish the breathtaking effect of its greatest works.

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‘Waking Dreams: The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites From the Delaware Art Museum’

Where: San Diego Museum of Art, 1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays; closed Mondays

Ends: July 29

Price: $4 to $10

Contact: (619) 232-7931 or www.sdmart.org