Urgent Private Affairs: Pre-Raphaelites and the Crimea

'The Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces in the Crimea - and Staff' by Joseph Noel Paton (1855)

“Got up late. Raining, morning did not go out set to work by 10, French revolution proclaimed, worked at the balustrade & laid in the pavement till 5 when Aunt Brown called and we had tea.”

‘Diary of Ford Madox Brown’ - Paris, 25^th February 1848. [1]

Is there something self-consciously playful about this diary entry
or is this really a fair representation of the artist’s world view?
Shouldn’t that be ‘barricade’ rather than ‘balustrade’ and shouldn’t
the pavement be ‘torn up’ rather than ‘laid in’? After all, as almost
every account of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood is keen to remind
us, the PRB began the first stage of its life in this same year – 1848,
the ‘year of revolutions’[2]. It was the year in which those who had
long suffered unemployment, poverty and the threat of starvation in
France, Prussia, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, Italy (and, to
a lesser degree, the British Isles), engaged in insurrections,
demonstrations and other disturbances. But these were
intellectual as well as physical revolutions; ones in which a
rising, academic middle-class began to organise themselves
and openly express their desire to be free of all repressive
regimes. The repressive regime the PRB had in their sights
was the Royal Academy and its president Sir Joshua (or as
the PRB dubbed him, ‘Sir Sloshua’) Reynolds. True, the
Academy may not have openly brutalised the citizenry of
England with clubs in the streets but it must be remembered
that the fervor of European political radicals and their moderate
liberal sympathisers recognised the general idea of despotism
in all its manifestations and, in the PRB’s eyes, the Academy
was a club which had systematically brutalised the aesthetic
dispositions of the English people for decades. Importantly,
the PRB certainly saw themselves as radicals and art historians
have generally accepted them as such; aligning them with the
same urgent desire for change which set the Chartists on the
march through London in that year.

What I am keen to consider here is, if Pre-Raphaelitism began, even in
part, in answer to the very real events across Europe in 1848, then what
was the nature and extent of their response five years later when England
began its first large-scale military campaign since the Peninsular Wars? For many, military action in the Crimea was to be a war of 'liberation'. In 1853 there were great Liberal expectations that the coming war with Russia would revitalise the revolutionary impulse of 1848. It was a war against the Czar after all - a living effigy of feudal intransigence and despotism. What discernable impression did the evolving circmstances of the war make upon the expanding band of Pre-Raphaelites whose ages in 1853 ran from a nineteen year-old William Morris to the fifty-three year old William Dyce?

War in the Crimea had begun to seem an inevitability by 1853 and was played out between 1854 and 1856. The war, therefore is coetaneous with the period of transition between the PRB’s first and second phases; between the Ruskinian ideal of ‘seriousness, sincerity, and truth to nature’ allied with their original goal of illuminating uncomfortable ‘social ills’ to the more decorative productions of William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and D.G.Rossetti and the birth of the Aesthetic Movement. What effect, if any, did the war have upon those early Pre-Raphaelite ideals? Was it even the catalyst for that later development?

I

One of the very few studies to assess the Pre-Raphaelite response to the Crimea is to be found in Matthew Laumia's excellent 'Realism and Politics in Victorian Art of the Crimea'.[3] Lalumia cites a small number of Pre-Raphaelite works by James Collinson and Arthur Hughes now lost and two proposed paintings by Holman Hunt and Ford Madox Brown which never materialised but he concentrates more materially on two other completed and available works. The first, by Millais entitled, 'Peace Concluded' (left), exhibited in 1856 and the other by Joseph Noel Patton called, 'Home' exhibited by the Scottish Academy in the same year. Lalumia reads against the grain of Millais' apparently conservative painting which depicts the quiet celebration of the newly signed peace treaty by an officer returned from active service. Instead, Lalumia traces Millais originally intended title of 'Urgent Private Affairs' to suggest the picture began its life as 'a stinging pictorial comment on a topical issue produced by the Crimean War'. 'Urgent Private Affairs' was the well-worn excuse to return home offered by officers hoping to leave the front. Seen in this light, the officer is not recouperating but lounging in pampered comfort. He boasts no apparent wound to necessitate his incapacity and he neither looks particularly ill nor is he dressed in anything strongly indicative of convalescence. Paul Barlow, in his recent intricate readings of Millais work, observes that the presence of the dog lying at the man's feet adds to the satire, providing ‘a pastiche of the traditional effigy of the Christian knight’[5] found on medieval tombs.

He also identifies the presence of a diagonal of interlocking detail which runs from the barely visible print of Copley’s ‘The Death of Major Peirson’ (top right;) through the newspaper announcing the signing of the peace (fig. 1), on through the couples linked hands and across the deep red field of her skirt on which are placed the emblematic figures of the Russian bear the French cock the Turkey and the British Lion (fig.2).

The girl on the left offers the dove of peace with one hand whilst the observer’s eye is led to the other which rests, proprietarily, by the remaining figures in the Noah’s Ark (bottom left: fig. 3). Barlow's argument here is that the Copley print, depicting Major Peirson’s desperate and terminal struggle to defend Jersey from the French, echoes the desperation of the troops in the Crimea and is obscured and marginalised at one extreme of the painting ( the officers view is shielded by the woman) whilst the toys of Empire (the Indian tiger and the African Elephant) lie, ‘safely domesticated’ in the other.

Millais remained characteristically tight-lipped about his real intention with the painting and so the ambiguous nature of the image has been sustained. The cessation of hostilities in 1856 may well have robbed him, suddenly, of a market that had been scandalised by the excuse of 'Urgent Private Affairs' but whose concern was bound to evaporate after the signing of the peace. It is interesting to think that Millais may have then created a palimpsest by adding the newspaper and changing the title. Lalumia suggests that, even if he did, the satire is preserved in the sense that the central figure 'only reads of a peace concluded, when he ought to have been in the Crimea helping to secure the peace.'[4]

The same phenomena can be seen to work in another painting, begun by Ford Maddox Brown in 1851 but not finished until 1855. Here, the artist has added objects such as the miniature painting of a soldier and the pile of letters on which it is placed to suggest that the woman is a soldier's wife but which turn 'Waiting - an English Fireside in 1854-5' (left) into a macabrely suggestive narrative painting. The child in the woman's lap is a disturbing mixture of the vital and the cadaverous. Whilst the cheeks seem flushed the body's stiffened position suggests that this is a child beyond anyone's reach. Indeed, the mother does not hold the child at all and the black dress provides a funerial pall against which the child seems to float disconnectedly. The reflected flames from the fire appear almost as bloodstains against the child's gown whilst, over all, looms an enlarged and almost grotesque shadow whose head is more redolent of the guardsman's 'Busby' worn in the distant Crimea.

Barlow, Paul. Time Present and Time Past - the Art of John Everett Millais. British Art and Visual Culture since 1750: New Readings. London: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2005.

Lalumia, Matthew Paul. Realism and Politics in Victorian Art of the Crimean War. Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1984.

Surtees, Virginia, ed. The Diary of Ford Madox Brown. London; Newhaven: Yale University Press, 1981.

Wood, Christopher. The Pre-Raphaelites. London: Weidenfeld Nicolson Illustrated 1981.

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[1] Virginia Surtees, ed., The Diary of Ford Madox Brown (London; Newhaven: Yale University Press, 1981) p.21.

[2] Christopher Wood, The Pre-Raphaelites (London: Weidenfeld Nicolson Illustrated 1981) p.9.

[3] Matthew Paul Lalumia, Realism and Politics in Victorian Art of the Crimean War (Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1984).

[4] Lalumia, Realism and Politics in Victorian Art of the Crimean War p.95-6.

[5] Paul Barlow, Time Present and Time Past - the Art of John Everett Millais, British Art and Visual Culture since 1750: New Readings (London: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2005).

© Stuart Currie 2006