Paul Bryant's Reviews > Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives of the Pre-Raphaelites

According to this excellent book, PRB often stood for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but also stood for Please Ring Bell and occasionally Penis Rather Better.

But it could have stood for Painters Really Bonkers.

In the beginning there was a young art critic who had the ear of the cognoscenti called John Ruskin. Half of this book is about him. He was The Art Don. All the PRB thought he was like OMG I just saw John Ruskin walk by, I'm going to kiss the pavement whereupon he trod. But he was off the scale creepy. The Ruskin family were friends with the Grays and the Grays had a daughter. By the time she was 13 John was 22 and was writing fairy stories for her and thinking that she might be The One. She grew up to be a real drop-dead stunner. Her name was Euphemia and they called her Effie. I would have too. 90% of the interesting history of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood followed from the curious fact that when 28 year old John Ruskin got to marry the 19 year old Effie in 1848 he declined to have sex with her. For six years*. Until she got so freaked out by this that she divorced him. Which was huge. In those days you actually had to get a separate Act of Parliament passed in the House of Commons to finalise your divorce. That would make you think twice.

A great number of the people in this book spent a large amount of the short time they were allotted on this Planet Earth thinking about what did not go on between John Ruskin's John Thomas and Effie Ruskin's lady bits, and how the wind blew and the tumbleweed rolled between those most public of private parts. It was the talk of the town. For six years.

Meanwhile, the actual PRB were gathering together. Actually, there were two brotherhoods. The line-up for the first one was

John Millais, bass
William Holman Hunt, drums
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, lead guitar, vocals
Ford Madox Brown, rhythm (left after first album)

After Millais and Hunt went solo Rossetti reformed the band

William Morris, bass
Edward Burne-Jones, drums
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, lead guitar, keyboard, vocals

At first, PRB 1 was laughed at by the critics. But then Ruskin noticed them and decreed that they were brilliant. And so they were. And he became their great friend and supporter.

I liked this - John Millais was a boy genius and got on some people's nerves:

Once after winning a prestigious silver medal from the Society of Arts fellow pupils hung Millais head downwards out of a window and left him there, suspended over the pavement below, held only by the scarves and pieces of string that his peers had selected to attach him to the iron window guards until his precarious situation was noticed by passers-by

How to analyse a Millais painting

The subject is "Lorenzo and Isabella" (painted when Millais was 19)



The brother in the foreground is holding up a nutcracker in his right hand. While the cracking of a nut could well indicate his desire to emasculate poor Lorenzo, the shadow he himself casts is of a brooding sexuality directed at his own sister. The shadow of his forearm on the table looks like an erect penis, a mound of white ejaculate indicated by salt spilt on the cloth. The brother's foot points at his sister's lap.

The PRB were the first English bohemians. They broke various social taboos, they just couldn't care. The main thing they did was locate stunners on the London streets. They would go out as a group deliberately trawling for stunners (their word), and they would inveigle the girls to become models. The girls were shop assistants or prostitutes, because being an artist's model was the same as prostitution to the Victorians, no difference at all. Then the boys would get these working-class or even underclass girls to live with them, and – the ultimate shockingness – they occasionally married these girls, sometimes after paying for them to get trained up in the middle-class niceties of fashion and manners first. Then they would have affairs with each others' models and/or wives. And it was a whirligig ride for the girls. (For those interested, it turned out that Annie Miller was the Yoko Ono.)

Sometimes it turned out well – Millais got off with Effie – and sometimes it ended badly – Rossetti got off with Lizzie Siddall, shop assistant turned IT girl; he became besotted; promised to marry her; ten years later was still promising; by which time she was a junkie (laudanum) with mental health problems; then finally he did marry her, then he copped off with another woman; then she committed suicide, aged 29. Oh yes, and in his extravagant grief, as a grand gesture Rossetti cast a manuscript book of his own poetry into the coffin , and some months later regretted this rashness and got a special license to get the coffin exhumed to retrieve his bloody poetry, which he now wished to publish and dedicate to his new girlfriend, which, you know, was in poor taste, because she was another man's wife. And you have to laugh because there was a wormhole through his favourite poem. Literally. A hole made by a worm.

As for Ruskin, he survived the wagging tongues and in a truly gothic E A Poe-ish way he started to repeat the same Effie story again with another young girl, this one being ten when he met her aged 39. That wretched car crash takes up most of the last quarter of this book.

The PRB was a living museum of psychosexual morbidity which they then laid bare in their beautiful art. All that yearning, all that death, all that prettiness. All those flowers and fabrics and little mice and foliage and eyes like saucers and undraped flesh and knights and goats and doom.

And finally

Rossetti liked to keep inappropriately exotic pets in his garden. They all died of neglect. His favourite was a wombat.

The wombat did not last long in the Rossetti household. Anecdotally, its demise was as a result of eating a box of cigars.





* One theory about JR was that he had been so conditioned by his immersion in classical art that he was struck with repulsed horror at the sight of his new wife's pubic hair. (Could this happen to a young man of today, I wonder? I think it might, but it wouldn't have been classical art he had been immersed in.)