Patrick Comerford
I have tried – but failed – during recent visits to Oxford, to search in the Ashmolean Museum for a Pre-Raphaelite portrait that inspired a late Victorian photograph of my grandfather.
The formal portrait of John Ruskin (1819-1900) by Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896) has been held by the Ashmolean for the past ten years. But each time I went in search of it the painting was on loan to another exhibition. So, when I was in Oxford last week, I returned to the Ashmolean Museum to see this painting which is part of the current exhibition, ‘Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design.’
Ruskin was an important figure in the Pre-Raphaelite circle in Oxford. His book The Stones of Venice was influential as I was developing my interests in architecture and later as I developed my interests in Venice. His portrait, painted by Milais 170 years ago in 1853, captures Ruskin in a style that fulfils Ruskin’s ideals.
But I also had family reasons for wanting to see this portrait. When my grandfather, Stephen Edward Comerford (1867-1921), was young and successful, he had his portrait taken in a way that presented him as a young Victorian man with confidence looking forward to the future.
I had always imagined that the photograph was taken in a Victorian photographer’s studio, but with the intent of creating the impression of an ideal rustic background, with a cascading waterfall, rocks, rich vegetation, and a clearing in a thicket. Stephen Comerford is dressed in a three-piece suit and wing-collar shirt, holding a walking cane in one hand and a hat in the other. But his shoes are well-made and highly-polished, so this is clearly a studio scene rather than a setting at the Powerscourt Waterfall near Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, or at a waterfall in Killarney, Co Kerry. It is certainly not in the Scottish Highlands.
It seems like a photograph that a man confident a full and successful career lay ahead of him would like to have taken. I only have a copy of the photograph, from the house in Terenure where my grandmother lived, rather than the original. So I have no idea of the original date of the photograph, or of the name of the photographer. When it was announced in 2013 that the Ashmolean had acquired Millais’s portrait of Ruskin, I realised that my grandfather’s photograph was modelled on this celebrated Pre-Raphaelite painting.
This is the painting that led to the breakdown of Ruskin’s marriage, and until it was acquired by the Ashmolean it was ‘one of the most important Pre-Raphaelite paintings’ that had remained in private ownership.
The Ashmolean has such a rich collection of Pre-Raphaelite works because of the many connections members of the movement had with of Oxford. A number of them – including Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, Alfred William Hunt and John Ruskin – studied at the University.
Ruskin left much of his collection, including his teaching collection, to the university. He was an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, from 1836 to 1842, when he lived with his mother on High Street. His Modern Painters, published anonymously in 1843, was credited to him as ‘a graduate of Oxford’. His writings were highly influential and he became irrevocably associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, befriending Millais and Hunt, and then Rossetti, Siddal and Burne-Jones.
Ruskin was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in 1869. He was critical of the teaching methods at the art schools of his day, and founded the School of Drawing in 1871.
When I set out in search of Ruskin’s portrait by Millais in the Ashmolean in September, I learn it has been on loan for some months to another exhibition. Instead, I spent an educational and enjoyable afternoon in Pre-Raphaelite Gallery, but shall have to return soon again to find the portrait that may have inspired the pose in that Victorian photograph of my grandfather.
Thankfully, I found the portrait last week when I visited ‘Colour Revolution’, the Ashmolean’s autumn exhibition which presents a dazzling version of the Victorian world, surprisingly one of the most colourful periods in history.
Ruskin was one of the most influential writers on art and architecture in 19th century Britain, and strove to restore colour to its rightful importance in art. Since the Renaissance, colour had been considered by many as secondary to composition and draftsmanship.
Ruskin argued that colour was a God-given gift and should be embraced as it had been in mediaeval art. He believed the colours of the natural world could inspire and guide artists who should replicate them as truthfully as possible. ‘You ought to love colour, and to think nothing quite beautiful or perfect without it,’ he wrote in The Elements of Drawing in 1857.
Ruskin was a passionate defender of JMW Turner, and considered him one of the greatest colourists. Both Ruskin and Turner were profoundly influenced by the colours and patterned architecture of Venice. Ruskin also taught art at Oxford. His lectures and writing helped shape debates around colour and greatly influenced the Pre-Raphaelites.
This exhibition dispels the myth that the Victorian era was a dreary landscape of ‘dark satanic mills’ and cities choked with smog. Instead, it shows how developments in art, science and technology resulted in an explosion of colour that was embraced by artists, designers and regular people in the 19th century.
The exhibition reveals a spectacular and flamboyant array of artworks, costume and design that sprung from this ‘colour revolution’. It features 140 objects from international collections ranging from Ruskin’s exquisite studies, Turner’s and Whistler’s experiments with colour harmony, and elegant designs by William Morris and his company, to fashion, jewellery and homeware that enlivened the streets and homes of Victorian Britain and Europe.
The exhibition opens with an evocative object, encapsulating our dark preconceptions of the period: Queen Victoria’s mourning dress – she spent 40 years in black following the death of Prince Albert in 1861. But examples of Victorian fashion show people of the 19th century embracing the products of the Industrial Revolution, no more so than new aniline dyes. While the coal industry blackened Britain’s landscape, aniline, a by-product of coal-tar, introduced a rainbow of possibilities to Victorian wardrobes.
The display includes a purple dress, crinoline and shoes dyed with the first aniline colour, Mauvine, all retaining their shocking brilliance. As production increased, the price of dyes reduced, making bright colours available to the masses.
Although pigments had been manufactured for thousands of years, the term ‘synthetic’ is synonymous with the 19th century because of the scale and advances of chemical technology. It was an 18-year-old chemistry student, William Henry Perkin (1838-1907) who discovered Mauvine in 1856. This encouraged chemists across Europe to find more synthetic colours.
Perkin succeeded in 1867 in making alizarin, the active colorant of madder root, a traditional vegetable dye for reds, pinks and browns. Soon new anilines were being used to print postage stamps, make inks, pigments, paints, to colour paper and even food.
Advances such as these were celebrated in the International Exhibition in 1862, an important cultural event in the 19th century. It brought together examples of British, colonial and scientific products and it was the first time synthetic anilines were shown to an international audience. Two of the most fashionable aniline colours on display, vivid pinks - Magenta and Solferino – had been named after recent French victories over Austria in the 1859 Second Italian War of Independence.
The Ashmolean’s extraordinarily colourful Great Bookcase (1859-1862) was the centrepiece of the Exhibition’s Mediaeval Court. At three meters high, the bookcase echoes the polychrome porch of a Gothic cathedral, although its style is more eclectic.
The bookcase was designed by the architect William Burges (1827-1881), and it was painted by 13 promising young Pre-Raphaelite artists, including Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882).
Analyses show that Burges and the artists used contemporary materials including aniline green.
Revivalist and Pre-Raphaelite artists were working in the context of rapid scientific progress and the popularisation of new scientific ideas by figures like Charles Darwin (1809-1882). His concept of natural selection and the use of colour in the animal kingdom led to particularly gruesome Victorian appetites for two of nature’s most beautiful animals, beetles and hummingbirds. Unlike the feathers of a peacock, whole bird and beetle bodies were incorporated into Victorian fashion and jewellery.
The jeweller Harry Emmanuel created coveted designs including a Hummingbird necklace (1865) made of seven decapitated emerald and ruby-topaz birds. There was such a hummingbird craze that in one week alone in 1888, 400,000 ‘skins’ were auctioned, and a further 370,000 in the following week.
In 1884, the Portuguese ambassador to London presented the Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, with a piece of jewellery made of the bodies of 46 iridescent green South American weevils. Granville had these mounted on a tiara and necklace for his wife in 1885.
Colourful fashion had a human cost too: in 1862 a factory girl making artificial flowers for women’s headdresses died from poisoning. She was said to have vomited green slime and had green tinged eyeballs. The killer was the main ingredient of the new green dye – arsenic. The incident prompted a review of the use of green in fashion and homeware, and green wallpaper became known as ‘walls of death’.
Scandals such as this and the ever-growing use of colour in popular culture prompted discussions on colour theory and different colours’ moral qualities. The exhibition shows artists who had famously different attitudes. Ruskin believed artists should stick to the God-given colours of nature, while James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) disagreed entirely and followed a philosophy of ‘colour for colour’s sake’. His extravagant use of colour was made easier by the invention of collapsible metal paint tubes.
Certain ‘unnatural’ colours were embraced by the ‘Decadent’ movement – such as the dyed-green carnation sported by Oscar Wilde. Another Decadent favourite was yellow, epitomised by a series of French novels that had distinctive yellow covers. The avant-garde periodical, The Yellow Book appeared in London in 1894. Its bright yellow cover was designed by Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898). Uncompromisingly stylish and ready to push boundaries, The Yellow Book came to define the decade as ‘the Yellow ’90s’.
Photography and electricity also had revolutionary impacts at the time, and some of the first innovators were women. ‘Colour Revolution’ features one of the earliest colour reproduction techniques, cyanotypes, made by Anna Atkins (1799-1871), who used the process to create ethereally beautiful ‘photograms’ – made without a camera – of British algae, published between 1843 and 1853.
The exhibition is curated by Matthew Winterbottom, Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Ashmolean Museum, and Professor Charlotte Ribeyrol of the Sorbonne Université, Paris.
The exhibition, ‘Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design’ continues in the John Sainsbury Exhibition Galleries in the Ashmolean Museum until 18 February 2024. It is open daily from 10 am to 5 pm, and tickets are from £6 to £17.
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