‘Victorian Radicals’ at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery - Review
The Blind Girl, Everett Millais (1854-56)
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s latest exhibition, Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement, showcased fantastic pieces of artwork from nineteenth-century Britain with a focus on the men and women who contributed to the artistic movements. The exhibition emphasised the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and how their artistic ideologies fed into the Arts and Crafts movement.
The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of young artists led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt, who grouped together in London in 1848 over their shared admiration for the Italian painter, Raphael (1483-1520). The young artists rejected the modern style of painting taught at traditional schools, and instead preferred bright colours and explored serious social issues in their work, such as prostitution, which contributed to their ’radical’ identity. Of course, the main attraction of the exhibition was Birmingham Museum’s outstanding collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and sketches which consisted of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine (1881-82), Arthur Hughes’s The Long Engagement (1854-59), and John Everett Millais’s The Blind Girl (1854-56) which I particularly enjoyed seeing.
Musica, Kate Bunce (1890-1902)
One of the main aims of the exhibition was to demonstrate Birmingham’s role in the Arts and Crafts movement by referring to it as a ‘centre’, highlighting the opening of Birmingham’s Municipal School of Art in 1885. As women played a key role in establishing the municipal school by promoting it in national and international exhibitions, the role of women was another theme highlighted throughout the exhibition.
With an insightful audio conversation between the exhibition’s curator, Victoria Osbourne, and Victorian art historian, Kirsty Stonell Walker, visitors gained a deeper insight into the paintings, particularly regarding the involvement of women in the movements. Osbourne explained the rationale behind selecting Birmingham-born Kate Bunce’s painting Musica (1895) for the exhibition’s advertisements which encapsulates many of the exhibitions overarching themes, including how the Pre-Raphaelite style of painting still flourished in the late nineteenth century, and the convergence with the Arts and Crafts movement. Bunce was also a prize-winning student at the Birmingham School of Art, leading Osbourne and Stonell-Walker to describe Musica as a ‘very Birmingham image’, reflecting the significant, though often overlooked, role of women in the Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts movement.
The convergence of the two movements was further highlighted by showing different artistic mediums such as a court dress (1893), stained-glass windowpanes, jewellery, and metal work. The court dress was designed and made by Sarah Fullerton Monteith Young for a client to have an audience with Queen Victoria, who used fabric designed by William Morris. Morris fabrics from the period are extremely rare, and so the dress serves as a very special example of Arts and Crafts dress. The importance of Birmingham was emphasised further by the inclusion of a silver and rock crystal fruit dish created by Birmingham-based jewellery designer John Paul Cooper who became the head of Birmingham’s Central School of Art in 1903.
Proserpine, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1881-82) The Long Engagement, Arthur Hughe (1854-59)
Visitors were also asked the question of “the value of the handmade, the relationship between designing and making, and the status and purpose of art in an industrial world”? What accentuated the relationship between old and new were two textiles that hung opposite each other. Old Master by John Crossley & Sons (1851) was created by steam-powered looms and combines the Pre-Raphaelite appreciation of pre-industrial visual style with mass production, and a bedcover (1908) which was hand embroidered by the artist.
Overall, the exhibition wonderfully displayed the artwork of the Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts movements, and it was fantastic to see so many well-known paintings in one exhibition. If attending this exhibition was your first experience of the artistic movements, you are sure to be amazed and inspired to find out more about artwork and their creators. By including influences behind the works, the context in which they were created, and events in the creators’ private lives, the exhibition successfully demonstrated the radical nature of the movements and their artists. By drawing upon Birmingham-born artists, the importance of the city as a historical and cultural hub, as well as the importance of women artists, the exhibition effectively integrated Birmingham’s contributions to the movements.