This work began as a dissertation and carries with it an intensity of focus. The book is essentially not an overview of belief in mid-century Britain or of Bible illustration in general, but of the Christian imagery of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Michaela Giebelhausen does attempt to contextualize these painters' work with some allusion to continental parallels and English precedents. The problematic for Britain cannot be overstated; since the reign of Edward VI in 1547, England resolutely eschewed religious imagery. Thus these artists faced the tension between competing concepts of depiction—continental models continually suspicious as harbingers of superstition and English works so connected to traditional academic (secular) painting as to seem lacking in sincerity of religious expression.
Giebelhausen applies anthropological structures proposed by Pierre Bourdieu to her thesis that all revolutionaries argue for returning to the original source. Giebelhausen summarizes the tradition of painting ideals established by Reynolds in the Royal Academy and their continued use by professors of painting Henry Howard and Charles Robert Leslie, who broadened the academic discourse to include more naturalistic elements, an inspiration for the painters of this study. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848, motivated by sincerity of purpose (as championed by John Ruskin) and the study of Nature. The mechanical work associated with the “correct drawing” inspired by Raphael seemed inimical to the authenticity demanded of the subject. She courageously addresses personal religious belief as a part of the self-image of the artist. Welcome passages include the reception of an earlier generation of religious paintings by Charles Lock Eastlake, William Dyce, and Daniel Maclise; assessment of the impact of continental woodcuts, especially the German illustrated Bibles and Anna Jameson's Protestant writings on religious imagery (deserving much great study); as well as discussion of Ruskin. She includes analysis of Nicholas Wiseman, Catholic archbishop of Westminster, along with other often neglected contemporaries.
There is ample evidence of Giebelhausen's careful assessment of contemporary criticism. She chronicles the reception of paintings such as Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (1850), greeted by “vitriolic attacks from the press” (100). Yet we are left with the historiography of our own generation's interest in Pre-Raphaelites, and the question of why we find religion so fascinating, unexplored. We have moved away from “art” and painterly success as it dominated scholarly discourse in the 1970s—such as in Timothy Hilton's The Pre-Raphaelites (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), which nonetheless begins with Ruskin's religious background as crucial to the movement's development. The text also avoids contextualizing the later popularity of these works, which testifies to a broadening base for reproductive art and transformed religious sentiment. William Holman Hunt's Light of the World (1851–53), for example, became a perennial favorite as framed print and church window. One of the first examples, recorded as indebted to the engraving published by Messers Pilgrim & Lefèuvre, may be a window placed in January of 1876 in St. Luke's Church (now St. Luke and the Epiphany, Episcopal) in Philadelphia. Some attention to such issues does appear, for example, in Giebelhausen's discussion of Hunt's The Shadow of Death (1870–73), with the young Christ in an attitude of prayer after a day of carpenter's labor. She quotes from Farrar and Meynells's 1893 biography of Hunt that its greatest supporters were “working men … who went in numbers to see the picture and to subscribe for reproductions for their own walls” (181).
A major portion of the book focuses on Hunt, who, Giebelhausen contends, “overthrew every existing convention of religious painting” (198). Throughout the book she interweaves an understanding of contemporaneous religious debate, but nowhere more ably than in her analysis of Hunt's intersection with liberal Protestantism and higher criticism in biblical studies, especially Ernst Renan's The Life of Jesus, and other major controversies of the era. Her treatment of Hunt's travels to the Holy Land, to be paralleled later in the century by the French James Tissot, is a solid contribution to our understanding. This richly nuanced reassessment will surely transform the way Hunt will be discussed in the future.
Despite the restriction of a study of this length, there might have been greater acknowledgment of the precedents from Europe and contemporaneous competition; Gustav Doré's English Bible, for example, appeared in 1866. One wonders about a lingering isolation of Catholic and Protestant perspectives, making it difficult to acknowledge more fully the earlier German and French revivals, which held ideals later articulated by the Pre-Raphaelites. The Brotherhood of St. Luke (Lukasbund) grouped a similar band of young artists who, known as the Nazarenes, from 1810 transformed German religious expression. One member, Peter von Cornelius, for example, became director of the Munich Academy in 1825. The north-south issues that Giebelhausen discusses (4) were personified in Johann Friedrich Overbeck's Italia and Germania (1828), acquired in 1832 by Ludwig, crown prince of Bavaria. A major voice in the Oxford Movement, A. J. B. Beresford Hope, collected Nazarene paintings and in 1843 commissioned Munich windows for Christ Church, Kilndown, Kent.
We miss, as well, the context of the English architectural and decorative arts of fresco and stained glass in which these artists participated. The Pre-Raphaelites formed during the decade that Pugin unleashed his clarion call for sincerity and belief and his polemic against classicizing style in the True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture. Hunt's Light of the World is housed in William Butterfield's Keble College chapel (1873–76), a paragon of Tractarian ideals. I might suggest that we labor under the tyranny of the museum and art market of collectability where the pre-Raphaelite works on paper and canvas, often a preparatory drawing for a stained glass window, receive more attention than the actual window or fresco in situ. Such sentiments are not meant to detract from the impressive accomplishments of this study, carefully constructed and well-documented, but they are a call for future studies making a more synthetic link between high and low art, and encompassing all the religious imagery actually experienced by “receivers” of visual culture in Britain.
