On “The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists”

The New Criterion

The show begins with a rock, but what a rock it is. Inside the entryway of “The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists” at the National Gallery of Art hangs the most famous water-color painted by the Victorian firebrand and art critic John Ruskin. Fragment of the Alps (ca. 1854–56) depicts a block of gneiss teetering on the edge of a rubble field, set against a cobalt sky. Deep striations in the boulder show the movement of once-molten magma, while veins of feldspar glimmer and seams of iron wash its surface in red and orange. Ruskin was enthralled by the spiritual potential of nature. At a time when the Royal Academy’s students spent their days sketching the muscular bodies of Greek plaster casts, Ruskin instructed his to go outside and draw the first stone they came upon.

Ruskin never traveled to the United States, but his boulder did, building the foundation for an art movement that pronounced nature—and its faithful depiction—as the wellspring of spiritual and artistic beauty. Amid the turmoil of the Civil War, a group of young men gathered in a studio off Washington Square in New York to reform a culture “beset on all sides by old-time prejudice and obstinate ignorance.” As with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England, they were united by their respect for Ruskin and belief that the traditional conventions of art only patched over the cultural rot hollowing out society.

Curated by Linda Ferber and Nancy K. Anderson, the National Gallery exhibition commemorates the two-hundredth anniversary of Ruskin’s birth. It is one of the largest displays of American Pre-Raphaelites ever attempted—a significant but not gargantuan feat, given the movement’s brief heyday in the 1860s and ’70s. Nonetheless, the exhibition of ninety watercolors, oil paintings, and drawings features many previously unshown works and new research on the group’s abolitionist views. Represented artists include Thomas Charles Farrer, Charles Herbert Moore, John William Hill, William Trost Richards, and Richard’s protégé, Fidelia Bridges.

“The world has had enough morbid fiction; it now needs healthy fact,” noted Moore, one of the founders of the American Pre-Raphaelites. The group turned away from the chaotic veil of war and heeded Ruskin’s call to walk with nature, “laboriously and trustingly.” Nothing less than absolute realism could capture the beauty and power of divine creation. They formed America’s first plein air movement, combining painstaking precision and spirituality with a strong rejection of the idealistic strain in landscape precedent.

At first glance, the exhibition borders on the trivial, with gallery after gallery of small pictures and tranquil renderings. But the artworks unfold under the patient eye, revealing perceptive detail and dazzling technique. Following Ruskin’s dictum to “trace the finger of God” in nature, the American Pre-Raphaelites championed the unextraordinary, the insignificant, and the unkempt. The beauty of creation could be found in any subject if depicted faithfully and stripped of contrivance. The American Pre-Raphaelites tested the limits of this theory in a variety of ways: an overgrown wheat field, a stalk of milkweed, and cattle bones washed ashore were all subjected to their inexhaustible scrutiny.

A winter landscape by Moore captures the stated goals of these painters with delicate precision. In High Peak and Round Top (Catskill) in Winter (1866), simple clapboard houses sit atop snow-covered fields. Along the eastern slope, deep footprints cut into a blanket of snow. The white of the western slope, exposed to the warm afternoon sun, has thinned to reveal patches of dormant yellow grass underneath. In the distance, the Catskill Mountains are cloaked in bare trees that echo the bedrock underneath. “Form is a cup which bears the essence of spiritual realities to us,” Moore wrote at the time. In his pursuit of truth, Moore has created a winter scene that is exquisitely rendered, yet strictly literal. The pictures of the American Pre-Raphaelites politely request your attention, but they do not demand it.

While peaceful on canvas, the American Pre-Raphaelites were polemic in print. Believing that the existing platforms of artistic discussion too often relied upon indiscriminate praise, they established a journal of essays and criticism titled The New Path (or “The New Wrath” to its targets). With a clarion in one hand and a bullhorn in the other, they confronted the artists of the Hudson River School. They went after the theatrical artifice of Albert Bierstadt, who designed special drapery, lighting, and viewing tubes for the display of his grand landscapes. Yet it was not too late for Bierstadt’s artistic salvation, Moore wrote in The New Path, if he allowed “God’s truth [to] come in and take the place of vanity.” Thomas Cole’s landscapes were “pieces of hopeless imbecility,” according to a pseudonymous author, and “in twenty-five years will not be worth the canvas they are painted on.”

But ultimately, it was the American Pre-Raphaelites’ lifespan, not Cole’s, that rivaled the mayfly’s. Their first collective show, an 1867 exhibition of realists at Yale, was also their final show. The New Path lasted only two years. Collectors and critics viewed their art as “hard and harsh” and devoid of “atmosphere and poetry.” By the end of the nineteenth century, tastes had shifted towards the socially focused realism found in Barbizon, Paris, and Munich. Yet the artists formerly known as the American Pre-Raphaelites continued to influence American culture. Their newly sophisticated handling of watercolor elevated the medium and supported the debut of the American Watercolor Society in 1867. As a Harvard professor, Moore was the first to introduce Ruskin to a university curriculum in the United States, while Fidelia Bridges and Henry Roderick Newman helped usher in the AmericanAesthetic movement.

Ruskin may not have set foot in the New World, but with a boulder as his emissary he changed the landscape of American art. In a letter, he noted having “much to thank America for—heartier appreciation and a better understanding of what I am and mean, than I have ever met in England.” As the new show in Washington at-tests, Ruskin’s Americans did it best—capturing the delicate beauty of our ordinary nature.

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, June 2019.