Painting Dissent: Art, Ethics, and the American Pre-Raphaelites, by Sophie Lynford

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'Painting Dissent' by Sophie Lynford

The British Pre-Raphaelites have solid footing in art history as a fascinating anomaly—a path to modern art that led through an imagined medieval past. Their American offshoot was scarcely acknowledged by art historians until the Brooklyn Museum’s 1985 exhibition, “The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites.” In Painting Dissent, Delaware Art Museum curator Sophie Lynford draws on research from the past 40 years, as lost work was uncovered, and new interpretations have been brought to the forgotten chapter in American aesthetics.

As her title announces, Painting Dissent locates the American Pre-Raphaelites in the long American project of fulfilling the nation’s promise of social progress. The evidence is less obvious in the paintings themselves than in essays from the American Pre-Raphaelite journal, The New Path, condemning art by “men who did not strike slavery when the strokes were needed.” The American mavericks were keen to strike away the gauzy Romanticism of the Hudson River School to reveal a plainer sort of landscape realism, ostensibly “overthrowing formulas of pictorial organization that endorsed concepts of hierarchy, control, ownership, and cognitive possession.”

Architecture is where the American Pre-Raphaelites left their mark on the nation’s landscape by transplanting the Gothic revivalism of their British predecessors to the New World. They invoked the medieval guilds, which “guaranteed devoted workmanship, granted workers autonomy, and conferred status and respect” on communities of builders. Of course, the American Pre-Raphaelite espousal of Gothic as somehow more “democratic” than the architecture of democratic Athens or republican Rome was dubious at best, sheer nonsense at worst. And yet, regardless of their theoretical underpinnings, the Pre-Raphaelites decorated Harvard, Yale and other sites with remarkable buildings whose soaring arches suggest lofty aspirations.