Flights from Modernity.
Art as nostalgia.
When times become confusing or challenging, people often comfort themselves by escaping to the past. They fill their heads and their lives with reminders of a supposed golden age. This nostalgia is reflected in the cultural products which gain popularity; which reflect and express the anxieties of the nation and console them.
Looking to the past is nothing new in art. In one sense, every generation of artists is responding to or reacting against what has gone before. The Renaissance in Europe famously looked back to classical Greece and Rome, and sought to reinterpret the styles and priorities of that period. However, the roots of this can be found more in commercial growth and developing international links than in social unrest.
The Nineteenth Century in the UK was a mixed period.
As Victoria's reign advanced there was a growing celebration of achievement. Great Britain, it was believed, was leading the world in engineering and technology. The new railways, powered by steam locomotion, were transforming not just transport but even the way the nation kept the time. Manufacturing was booming through the development of the factory system. The promotion of self-improvement, especially through the Mechanics' Institutes and similar, was turning the population into a skilled and semi-skilled workforce. Entrepreneurial confidence and military power were opening the world to British goods, ideas and conquest, and the world map was turning pink.
There was a social cost too, and critics such as Charles Dickens in his Hard Times and Oliver Twist pointed out the evils created by all this progress.
Rain, Steam and Speed
JMW Turner
1844
And there was monumental social change.
The physical face of Britain changed. Factories and industrial areas turned green fields into crowded and polluted cities. The smoke over urban areas blotted out the sun and became legendary. And the population moved. As workers became in demand by the new industries, the nation urbanised; there was mass migration from the countryside to the towns and cities. The population of London, for example, doubled between 1800 and 1851. Housebuilding and sanitation barely kept pace, and the ways of life which had sustained villages for centuries were abandoned in the face of new demands. People felt rootless and in need of new ways of being with few precedents on which to draw.
George Childs
1840
In some ways, the new urban life was hardly worse than what had gone before. Rural life in the 18th and 19th centuries could be perilously impoverished. Death from starvation was not unknown. And yet a feeling quickly grew that something good had been lost.
British literary past was plundered to create a 'heritage' on which contemporary society might anchor itself. Shakespeare had been popular since the 17th century, but the 19th century saw a resurgence in his fame. In 1829 De Quincy described his plays as "phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers". Similarly, the works of Chaucer were reconsidered and became part of serious literary study; the Chaucer Society was founded in 1868.
The Plays of William Shakespeare
John Gilbert
1849
As early as 1819, Sir Walter Scott published Ivanhoe, reinvigorating the legends of Robin Hood. In 1859 Alfred Lord Tennyson began to publish The Idylls of the King bringing to life the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of Camelot. Druid societies flourished in the 19th century fostering unhistorical ideas about the ancient druids. Similarly, there was a revived interest in all things Celtic, even though many popular ideas about the Celts were without any historical foundation. The previously unheard-of mythical figure of Ossian (Oisin) became well known. In the 1840s Augustus Pugin reinterpreted the medieval Gothic style and employed it in the new Palace of Westminster and in church buildings across the country.
And in the world of painting, artists drew on medieval culture to inform their art. As it was in other cultural areas, this was a re-imagining of a time which hardly existed, if at all. Nevertheless, as a visual medium, their work was persuasive and influential.
Chaucer at the Court of Edward III
Ford Madox Brown
1856
The Knight Errant
John Everett Millais
1894
Each of these three paintings were painted by members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Click here for a brief note about them.
King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid
Edward Burne-Jones
1884
Claudia and Isabella
Holman Hunt
1850
As well as imagining a golden distant past, popular nostalgia also re-imagined a more recent innocent past which was now lost.
The Health of the Bride
Stanhope Alexander Forbes
1889
A Rustic Timepiece
James Turpin Hart
1856
Were artists creating this mood of looking back to the past with fondness? Or were they reflecting a mood in the nation? Probably both were true. Ordinary householders looking to decorate their interior walls provided a ready market for these subjects (usually as prints of engravings or copies), which in turn gave artists good reason to paint them.