Exhibit of the week: The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography & Painting, 1848–1875

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Through Jan. 30, 2011

The handful of British artists who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were “a radical yet backward-looking” bunch, said Jeffry Cudlin in the Washington City Paper. The movement’s major figures—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Ruskin—looked at academy-style painting of the 19th century and decided that art had taken a wrong turn when Raphael first picked up a brush more than 350 years earlier. These rebels were “smitten with medievalism” and, in striving to depict only “honorable” subjects, produced many paintings that were at best “a little corny.” But at least one group of artists of more lasting influence took notice. As a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art shows, some of Britain’s earliest photographers adopted the pre-Raphaelites’ visual vocabulary as their own.

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The photographers obviously “got the better part of the deal,” said Andy Grundberg in The Washington Post. Seeking high-art validation for their nascent medium, such “major figures” as Julia Margaret Cameron and Henry Peach Robinson “took the pre-Raphaelite preoccupation with the poetic and archaic and produced beautiful and affecting images.” However “goofy” an idea it may have been to create photographic tableaux from the legends of King Arthur’s court, Cameron’s gorgeous Parting of Lancelot and Guinevere and Robinson’s Lady of Shalott are far more arresting than similar scenes rendered in oils. The pre-Raphaelites who devoted themselves to landscape painting, including Ruskin, fared far better. Their canvases show “a fetching devotion to endless details and uniformly bright colors.” Though these pictures look less real than they were intended to, their effect is appealingly modern.

Not all of the landscape canvases are masterpieces, said Sophie Gilbert in the Washingtonian. Some are simply reminiscent of “bad hotel-room paintings.” And the simpler landscape photographs remind us how young the medium was: “Three bare trees and a path do not an Ansel Adams make.” The “best pieces” in the whole show might be the photographs that simply “document the movement itself.” Actress Ellen Terry, who was briefly married to the pre-Raphaelite painter George Frederic Watts, provided a compelling muse for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll). The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, considered a kindred spirit by the group, seems tellingly world-weary in one of Cameron’s 1865 portraits. “It’s rare to be given close photographic insight into such an influential artistic group.” If painting wasn’t their forte, so what?