Visual Culture in Britain

ISSN: 1471-4787 (Print) 1941-8361 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rvcb20

Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation

from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War,
by Elizabeth Prettejohn, New Haven, CN and
London: Yale University Press, 2017, pp. 288, £45,
Hardback

Ayla Lepine

To cite this article: Ayla Lepine (2017) Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from
the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War, by Elizabeth Prettejohn, New Haven, CN and London:
Yale University Press, 2017, pp. 288, £45, Hardback, Visual Culture in Britain, 18:3, 410-413, DOI:
10.1080/14714787.2017.1363520

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2017.1363520

Published online: 23 Aug 2017.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 30

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rvcb20
Book Review

Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from

the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War, by Elizabeth
Prettejohn, New Haven, CN and London: Yale University
Press, 2017, pp. 288, £45, Hardback.

In 1895, the painter and critic (and cousin of the writer, Robert Louis
Stevenson) R.A.M. Stevenson published a book in which he explored
Velásquez as a truly modern artist. Stevenson interpreted Velásquez’s
technique through the lens of Impressionism, and referenced his fin-de-
siècle contemporaries as Impressionist revivalists. In the midst of
Elizabeth Prettejohn’s discussion of the significance of Spanish Old
Masters for Frederic Leighton in both his Royal Academy lectures and
many of his most substantial paintings, Stevenson’s views signal
Prettejohn’s own focus on how time, memory, imitation, and influence
are at work in British art history. She notes that for Stevenson,
‘Impressionism as an artistic movement is thus projected back to
Velásquez as its initiator, and its modern manifestation becomes a
“revival”, like the Pre-Raphaelite revival of early Renaissance painting,
rather than a modernist break with the past’ (183). This insight invites
new readings of late nineteenth-century historicism, fruitfully compli-
cating narratives of modernism that characterize the art-historical scho-
larly landscape on both sides of the English Channel. By exploring
questions of reference, allusion, and the deployment of the history of
art as a flexible tool in the production of new paintings, it is not only
possible but deeply right to probe what links might truly exist between
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, John Singer Sargent, and Pablo Picasso. For
artists, as well as for nineteenth-century curators, scholars, and collec-
tors, it was essential and truly modern to establish meaningful relation-
ships with Old Masters as no less than anachronic partners in
innovative paintings that delivered truly new messages regarding sub-
jects as diverse as love, God, literature, archaeology, and colour.
Prettejohn’s Modern Painters, Old Masters contends that, from the mid-
nineteenth century until well into the twentieth, British art’s relation-
ships with Old Master European painting were a precious resource for
the production of radically original work. From Ford Madox Brown to
William Orpen, artists turned again and again to the glorious riches of
the Italian Renaissance and to Spanish early modernism, many of which
were readily accessible for lengthy and nuanced study in a growing
array of regional public art galleries and national collections, as well as
in prints and watercolour studies (230). Quoting David Hume’s Georgian
rhetorical question, ‘Must we throw aside the pictures of our ancestors,
because of their ruffs and farthingales?’ at the outset of her project,
Prettejohn responds with a firm and appealing negative.1 For the artists

Visual Culture in Britain, 2017

https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2017.1363520
 book review 411

explored in this volume, the ‘pictures of our ancestors’ (and by ‘our’

ancestors) are a storehouse of cultural memory offering endless potential
for innovation. Prettejohn questions the nature of this capacity for deriv-
ing the new from the deep well of the old, and even goes so far as to
claim that this period of British art was at its most boldly original when
faithfully imitating, alluding to, and referencing Old Master artworks.
This is not to say that Prettejohn stakes a claim in old clichéd ground – a
discourse that would seek to dismiss modern British art as derivative or
lacking in imagination; indeed, she argues persuasively for this dull
notion’s true opposite.
When John Ruskin activated the poetic histories of Gothic Venice for
Victorian minds in his art and writing, the past came alive in a way that
would electrify the arts and cultural life from Blackburn to Tasmania.
Two decades before him, the intrepid (and often enraged) A.W.N. Pugin
railed against the Neo-Classical Regency architectural establishment by
producing a new way of seeing the Middle Ages: both vigorously Gothic
and demonstrably Christian, Pugin’s medievalism had moral responsi-
bilities, and the world of art was inextricably entwined with ethics as
British religion became closely associated with the rise of the Gothic
Revival. These are examples of complex patterns of influence and refer-
ence, in which elements of art and architectural history fed the modern
imagination in ways that were startlingly new. A century later, the
question of reference and imitation remained. The literary theorist
Harold Bloom published The Anxiety of Influence in 1973,2 in which he
developed an account of ‘strong’ poets in the modernist canon
(Whitman, Eliot, et al.) wrestling heroically with their predecessors and
attempting originality through conquering the fear of mere copyism by
the thrust and parry of creative and conscientious misreading (Bloom
calls this ‘misprision’) (29). This argument was foundationally important
for David Solkin’s research on Turner, and Prettejohn acknowledges its
importance for her scholarship too. Influence is a perpetual challenge
and a perpetual joy in the thought and artistic output of the figures
Prettejohn considers, and the tension between the old and the new
develops paths through the wilderness so complex that even Newton’s
image of ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ does not quite describe the
creative tasks in view for artists such as Rossetti, Whistler, and Sickert.
Prettejohn poses fourteen questions – ranging from ‘How can we be
sure that one thing resembles another?’ to ‘Is there a kind of allusion that
is neither excessively dependent on the previous work nor critical of it?’ –
that create a framework of enquiry for the chapters that follow. The
lesson here is that while British art is certainly the subject of
Prettejohn’s close study, it is the thought world of reception history,
historicism, revivalism, cultural nostalgia, and influence that she ele-
gantly explores. This is a period in which tradition was by no means
abandoned, but indeed truly transformed. The rule-book of learning
from the Old Masters was not torn up, but remixed and reinterpreted
for a new generation of artists and viewers eager to swim in the waters of
a comingled historicism composed of harmonies rather than single
412 book review

sustained notes. Prettejohn invokes Pater as a monumental bridge

between text and image, and in the course of her investigation, Pater’s
voice is consistently powerful. A key element of the foundation for
celebrating the impulse of imitation as innovation is provided by
Pater’s claim that the ‘House Beautiful’ is collaboratively simultaneous
and eternal, in which ‘the creative minds of all generations are always
building together’ (177).
In one sense, paintings by Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Sickert, and
others stand as case studies in conversation with these crucial questions,
opening out significant fresh horizons for art history and building on
ideas proposed recently by Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood in
Anachronic Renaissance, in order to interrogate notions of temporality in
art.3 In another sense, John William Waterhouse’s Circe Offering the Cup of
Ulysses and Walter Crane’s The Renaissance of Venus are not case studies
testing ideas about imitation and influence tout court but, rather, the
corpus of material Prettejohn covers demonstrates that this turn to Old
Masters with a lively sense of invention and a delicately interlaced play
of dynamic references within a given artwork is a distinctive category of
art-making in modern Britain. The contention would seem to be that the
ineffably languid strength of Burne-Jones’ Venus or Evelyn Pickering’s
Ariadne, defining images of the Aesthetic Movement, express their psy-
chologically ambiguous, sumptuous sensuality in a bespoke language
inflected by the richness of a broad education conscientiously deployed
for a receptive public eager to make connections across periods and
cultural figures. Moreover, Prettejohn maintains that the ‘House
Beautiful’ of Walter Pater’s historicist ideal ‘is never finished and closed.
It continues to be built, it remains open’ (177).
In this vital new book, Victorian and Edwardian art is reinterpreted as
stimulatingly current, precisely because of the complexity and vitality of
its makers’ patient attention to the fabric of art and culture across
Europe’s earlier centuries. From the Renaissance mirror reworked for
new Victorian reflective surfaces in luminous paint, to the uncanny
comparison of Impressionism and Spanish Old Masters as a way
through the looking-glass of anachronic aesthetics, Prettejohn’s claims
about temporality and the polyvalency of imitation offer art historians
new avenues for understanding what made British art so modern.

Ayla Lepine
University of Essex
Ó Ayla Lepine, 2017

Notes

1. Hume, David, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, 1757.

2. Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence.

3. Nagel, Alexander and Wood, Christopher S., Anachronic Renaissance.

 book review 413

Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973).
Nagel, Alexander and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York:
Zone Books, 2010).