Super-Real

Peter Campbell

  • The Pre-Raphaelites by Christopher Wood
    Weidenfeld, 160 pp, £18.00, October 1981, ISBN 0 297 78007 7
  • The Diary of Ford Madox Brown edited by Virginia Surtees
    Yale, 237 pp, £15.00, November 1981, ISBN 0 300 02743 5
  • Eric Gill: Man of Flesh and Spirit by Malcolm Yorke
    Constable, 304 pp, £12.50, November 1981, ISBN 0 09 463740 7

You know a Pre-Raphaelite picture when you see one, but definitions come hard. The paintings are likely to be detailed, but Rossetti’s are soft and generalised; they often take subjects from English poetry or the Bible, but can be pure landscapes, or illustrations of Greek myths, or even about modern politics. The Pre-Raphaelite programme – to replace an exhausted tradition, of painterly conventionalities and trivial subject-matter, with a style which paid close attention to the detail of natural appearances and took themes of an aesthetically and morally elevated sort – is clear enough. The results evoke responses which are nothing like as simple.

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