My love of British Pre-Raphaelite painting goes back to childhood.

I grew up just outside of Wilmington, Delaware, and from an early age my artistic diet was rich in the the glorious storytelling of Howard Pyle and his students, and the dazzling works of the Pre-Raphaelites, both of which are represented by strong collections at the Delaware Art Museum.

I remember being impressed in particular by paintings in the Pre-Raphaelite collection by John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, with their mesmerizing detail, intense color and preternaturally sharp focus.

it was later, as a teenager who had been exposed to more art at the Philadelphia Art Museum and on school trips to museums in New York, that I became just as interested in work by less well known artists associated with the movement, like Frederick Sandys, Marie Spartelli Stillman, Edward Burne-Jones and Albert Joseph Moore. (I was then, as now, somewhat lukewarm on the work of Dante Gabriel Rosetti, leader of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but not the strongest of the painters in the group.)

The Bancroft Collection of Pre-Raphaelite Art at the Delaware Art Museum is one of the best outside of England, and it was tapped recently for the loan of key works (images above, top two) for a new major exhibition at the Tate Britain titled Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant Garde.

The exhibition contains over 150 works and I believe it is the largest of its kind since a show at the Tate in the 1980’s. Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant Garde just opened on the 12th and will be on display until 13 January 2013.

(For those in the U.S. and Russia, read on — I’m happy to say that a traveling version of the exhibition, at least 130 works, will be crossing the Atlantic for a run at the National Gallery in Washington, DC from February 17 to May 19, 2013. Those in Russia can look for it in Pushkin State Museum in Moscow in Summer 2013.)

The Tate has a small selection of works on their page for the exhibit, supplemented by a Pinterest page and some mentions on a blog, but in general follows the cluelessness that major museums seem to have about using the internet to promote their exhibitions. (Here’s a clue: it’s about the art, i.e. images of what’s in the show!)

As is often the case, newspapers do a better job of showing what’s in the exhibition than the museum itself; there are articles with images on the Guardian (slideshow and audio tour), The Telagraph and Bloomberg. Artist and writer Katherine Tyrell has a review and list of resources relevant to the exhibit on her blog Making a Mark.

You can also take hints from the works shown or mentioned and look them up. Wikipedia has a list of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. I list some additional links to resources on my 2007 post on The Pre-Raphaelites.

The exhibition looks to be a major event, with an extensive overview of this group of painters, highlighted many of their most important and well-known works.

This is despite a theme that reflects the Tate’s wrong-headed attempt to cast the Pre-Raphaelites as somehow precursors to Modernism, when in fact they were deliberate throwbacks and perhaps the last hurrah of artistic traditions that 20th century Modernism would come to revile as ‘false” and “illusionist” in the face of Modernist “truth”.

The weird theme of “Victorian Avant Garde” attempts to tie the Pre-Raphaelites into the lineage of Modernism by painting them as rebels and ahead of their time (and linking their penchant for plein air studies to the Impressionists), but comes off as an attempt to avoid the embarrassment that major art institutions still feel when catering to the public fascination with Victorian art.

It’s made more ridiculous by the way the Pre-raphaelites in particular were despised by the Modernist establishment, not only for their avowed truth to nature (illusion! illusion!), but by their narrative elements (mere illustration!!). Sigh.

Not that I’m saying the Pre-Raphaelites are without their flaws and excesses (they certainly had those, but that’s part of the fun); just that to break the flow of art history and relegate a quarter of a century of art to worthlessness on the basis of some pesudo-intellectual theories by Modernist art critics is what should really be embarrassing — but we apparently haven’t reached that point yet.

Those of us who have always loved Victorian painting, and the Pre-Raphaelites in particular, can take heart that they are at least receiving some light in major shows, under whatever excuse necessary.

[Correction: One of the exhibition’s co-curators has been kind enough to write a comment and correct my premature assumption about the museum’s intentions in the theme of the exhibit (see this post’s comments). I stand corrected and apologize for projecting my predisposed generalities on someone else’s intentions. (I should know better, not that it will likely stop me from doing it again when I get my dander up about the pervasiveness of Modernist influence in the arts, but I really should be more careful.) In this case, it’s nice to know I was wrong.]

(Images above, Frederick Sandys, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Sir John Everett Millais, Henry Wallis, William Holman-Hunt, Ford Maddox Brown)

(For the benefit of those familiar with the Delaware Art Museum’s Pre-Raphaelite collection, I’ll point out the the version of William Holman-Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil [above, third down] that is in the Tate show is the large one from the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, not the smaller but equally beautiful one from the Bancroft Collection.)

Painting on copper has a fairly long history in art, achieving a particular popularity among northern European artists in the 16th Century, and still has its contemporary proponents. Likewise the painting of miniatures also has a long history in art and is practiced by a number of contemporary artists. In the early 20th century, the Dadaists began experimenting with what would come to be known as “found art”, making already existing objects into art pieces.

In her series, Tondi observations, one of the three series currently displayed on her website, contemporary artist Jacqueline Lou Skaggs brings these three seemingly disparate genres together in twelve works — painting miniature oil paintings on the copper surface of discarded U.S. pennies.

Interestingly, as she points out in her description of the series, her actions elevate the value of the coins while simultaneously defacing them.

As you view the works, the individual large images can be clicked on for larger versions.

[Via Kottke]