Leila Rouhi
Master of Art in English Literature
12.11.2008
How do Millais’ paintings of Mariana and Isabella visualize Tennyson’s and Keats’s poems of the same title?
Introduction:
Millais was born in Southampton, England. He started drawing when he was four years old. He also won several medals for his paintings. In 1847, he met Holman Hunt in Royal Academy and they worked together. When he was nine years old he won his first major prize, the Society of Art’s Silver medal for a drawing of the Battle of Bannockburn. Then, one month after his eleventh birthday, he entered the Academy school as the youngest one. (1979, 24)
Millais’s paintings with their unique and new styles are fascinating and admirable. I myself like the way and the reason for the change he gives to the painting and to art. I think it is not just interesting to follow the old ways or methods of doing something, especially painting. And, Millais is still famous because his methods and thoughts are new and challenging. He is one of the main painters of the nineteen century and perhaps the best one who developed a new path in art and especially in painting.
Yet, what I am interested to explain in this essay is not mainly his challenging style and out look in painting, it is the power and delicacy with which he portrays Keats’ and Tennyson’s poems. So, I try to compare Millais’s paintings with these poet’s songs. And, I think it is helpful to refer to The Pre-Raphaelite movement and their main founders beforehand.
The Pre-Raphaelite Movement
In September 18485 seven men founded a secret society called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The term was chosen from their conviction that the painting of Raphael was the origin of a destroyed academic tradition. Three friends and former students of the Royal Academy of Art, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett
Millais were the main members. Much of their subjects matter was based on sources such as Sir Thomas Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur, or through the more recent literature of Walter Scott, John Keats, and Alfred Tennyson. (1979., 31)
The combining together of the three talents, the high-minded William Holman Hunt, the impulsive Dante Gabriel Rosette, and Millais not only resulted in their creation of a new English School of Painting, but also changed at least for ten years or so, the whole course and direction of Millais own life and work. These three men decided to go back beyond Raphael and paint from nature herself and to put what they saw straight onto canvas without painting on a dark brown canvas or using a brown varnish. (1979, 24)
It was at the Academy Schools that he met Holman Hunt and Rossetti and these three brilliant young men founded together the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. (1974, 19)
Regarding Pre-Raphaelite painters, Stephen Fliegal explains:
“It comprised artists of varying talents, artistic personalities, and visual tendencies. When most of us think of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, we generally summon to mind memorable, almost iconic images of beautiful long-haired women in medieval dress, or scenes drawn from English history and Arthurian legend. While the Pre-Raphaelites were also interested in contemporary Victorian life, there is, to be sure, a fascination; some might call it an obsession, with that vast period we know as the Middle Age. The works of the Pre-Raphaelites are the best-known of all English paintings, and yet there has been a tendency over the years to dismiss them as mere Victoriana, and to deny their proper place in the history of art. The Pre-Raphaelite movement itself crossed the second half of the 19 th century. As an artistic movement, it cannot be defined simply as a single style since.”
In the
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