Victorian painting has made slow but stately progress from the margins to the center of the historiography of British art and has finally become the subject of intense critical and historical scrutiny. But how should we look at it now? And in what relation does it stand to the vast corpus of images beyond the pantheon of high art, and to the institutions that regulated and promoted visual culture—museums and galleries? The discipline of art history assumed a recognizably modern form during the nineteenth century, and key figures such as John Ruskin straddled the roles of critic of contemporary art and pioneering art historian. Nonetheless, until well after the Second World War there was little to read about Victorian art beside monographs, mainly biographical rather than critical in approach, and often compiled as acts of family piety by descendents. Fine art was considered as separate and distinct from the wider visual culture of the era. Graphic journalism, for example, was invoked by art historians only as “source” material for modern-life paintings like Ford Madox Brown's Work (1852–63, Manchester City Art Gallery). Yet the “fine art” status of Victorian painting was itself widely questioned throughout the twentieth century. Pilloried by critics from Roger Fry to Clement Greenberg as modernism's defeated adversary, Victorian art was stigmatized as “kitsch,” its continuing popularity with the museum-visiting public seeming only to confirm this view. Derided by modernist critics and curators, the narrative and “academic” art of Victorian era was also neglected by the early generations of professional art historians in Britain. While Ellis Waterhouse, Edgar Wind, and others were undertaking pioneering accounts of eighteenth-century British painting in the mid-twentieth century, Victorian art was ignored, the subject only of biographical narratives by journalists such as William Gaunt. It was not until 1969 that the art dealer Jeremy Mass, in his synthetic Victorian Painters, assembled a recognizable canon of Victorian paintings and placed the works in the context of an anecdotal, if elegantly written history. Major interventions were made during the late 1970s and 1980s, notably the work of William Vaughan and Marcia Pointon in the field of early Victorian painting, and the 1984 Tate Gallery exhibition “The Pre-Raphaelites,” a popular and critical success, provided a benchmark of scholarship. Since the late 1980s, there has been an explosion of activity in the field, which has now reached critical mass. Under discussion here are three texts that expand the field of debate in useful and contrasting ways and that, seen together, provide a broad indication of the present state of the field.

Since their own time, the most widely discussed Victorian artists have been the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB). Among the seven brothers were three artists of major talent—William Holman Hunt, John Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; less well known are the sculptor Thomas Woolner and the painter James Collinson. Hardly remembered in their own right, but highly significant for the historiography of British art, however, were the final two members, Frederic George Stephens and William Michael Rossetti, both of whom became art writers producing a vast literature, biographical and critical, about the PRB. They were early, but brilliantly effective, publicists, and their efforts have borne fruit both in the central role the Pre-Raphaelites have played in the history of Victorian art ever since and in the biographical focus of the literature concerning the Brotherhood. The 1984 Tate exhibition and the critical and art-historical discussion engendered by it secured the Brotherhood's position at the heart of Victorian art scholarship. Yet the claims made by the exhibition's organizers were curiously modest, and there was no attempt to place the PRB in an international context or to assert a more important role for them, and, by extension, for British art, within the international canon of nineteenth-century art. There has long been a need for an ambitious, full-length account that would make broader claims for the movement than a monographic approach allows. Accounts of Pre-Raphaelite painting adopting the methods of a “social history of art,” which reads images in relation to the socioeconomic and ideological context, have, unwittingly, allowed the modernist critique of Pre-Raphaelitism. While providing systematic explorations of the meanings of major Pre-Raphaelite works in relation to contemporary issues of class, race, gender, and ideology, many recent accounts have ignored questions of aesthetic quality and value; some, indeed, have sidestepped the aesthetic dimension entirely.

Elizabeth Prettejohn's new study, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, takes the opposite view, assuming that “Pre-Raphaelite art should be studied and evaluated just as we would study and evaluate the art of any other significant group of modern artists, such as the Impressionists or the Surrealists” (p. 11). The traditional concerns of the art historian—composition, style, and form—are thus reinstated as the central practices of the discipline, and history and matters of context often take a secondary role. Prettejohn is concerned throughout to assert both the modernity of the PRB, and its major members’ centrality to the history of nineteenth-century art, a corrective to the usual notion of their insular eccentricity and medievalist “escapism.” Prettejohn also makes the important point that, unlike most European nineteenth-century avant-gardes, the Pre-Raphaelites were rebelling “from above.” Where Gustave Courbet, and later the Impressionists, rejected high-minded history painting in favor of the lower genres of landscape and urban figure painting, the Pre-Raphaelites turned to subjects like The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (Rossetti's first major work of 1849) as a riposte to the alleged triviality of the Royal Academy's staple fare. For Prettejohn, tight Pre-Raphaelite brushwork was implicitly an avant-garde practice, a critique of the followers of “Sir Sloshua” Reynolds who could cover canvas quickly with meretricious and glossy portraits. Powerfully written, the book is entirely convincing in portraying Pre-Raphaelite art as inherently modern, visually exciting, and of high aesthetic quality. The traditional image of the PRB as a loose amalgam of amiable, wombat-loving amateurs is wholly dispelled, and the strangely compelling beauty and power of Pre-Raphaelite art emerges as rarely before.

Prettejohn's analyses of the early Pre-Raphaelite works combine masterly visual analysis (especially in the chapter on “Technique”) with ambitious contextual readings, especially in relation to the textual sources from which the Pre-Raphaelites drew their subjects. She is almost as effective in her discussion of the images of modern life from the 1850s—Brown's Work, Millais's The Blind Girl, and Hunt's The Awakening Conscience—about which so much has recently been written. Here Prettejohn invokes Charles Baudelaire's essay of 1863, “The Painter of Modern Life,” which has long stood as the centerpiece of the social history of art's justification of the paradigmatic modernity of Edouard Manet and the Impressionists, even though Constantin Guys, the artist discussed by Baudelaire, was a French draughtsman employed by the Illustrated London News. There are dangers in acknowledging Baudelaire's fictionalized version of Guys as a benchmark of modernity—with his ability to capture the fugitive life of the modern city in swift and gestural strokes—since the Pre-Raphaelites’ competing version of modernity explores a contrasting (though no less modern) visual vocabulary. While Prettejohn's essay on “Pre-Raphaelite Realism” later in the book goes further than any earlier account in assessing the quite un-Baudelairean visual qualities of Pre-Raphaelite style, she might, too, have looked a little more closely at the dialogue with photography. Here is a radically novel visual medium, which was clearly influential on Pre-Raphaelite practice, and which is essentially, indeed definitively, modern. Landscape photographers such as Roger Fenton and Samuel Bourne achieved results rather closer to that of Pre-Raphaelite paintings than the example by Oscar Gustav Rejlander, which Prettejohn reproduces (p. 203). The relationship between photography and Pre-Raphaelitism is, however, more complex, since the threads of influence run in both directions. Julia Margaret Cameron, a photographer close to the Pre-Raphaelite circle in the 1860s and 1870s, is inexplicably absent.

One of the major problems with the Pre-Raphaelites, or Pre-Raphaelitism, is to define the subject's boundaries. Prettejohn's second chapter examines the “Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood” and rightly centers on an important new analysis of the work of Elizabeth Siddall, a significant artist whose short life, and whose position as Rossetti's muse, mistress, and eventually his wife, have overshadowed her artistic achievements. There are some choice remarks about Christina Rossetti as a Pre-Raphaelite poet. However, Prettejohn follows Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn's 1997–98 exhibition in overstating the links to Pre-Raphaelitism of a much larger group of women artists. Although important in their own right, they are no closer to the PRB either in style or in personal affiliations than a legion of male Victorian artists rightly excluded from consideration here. Joanna Mary Boyce, in particular, seems stylistically at odds with all around her here, closer in style to a second-rate follower of the Nazarenes, such as William Cave Thomas, than to the PRB. A third chapter, “Pre-Raphaelitism,” has a great deal of work to do in carrying the narrative from 1852 until the end of the century but manages this task effectively. The end of Pre-Raphaelitism is very much less straightforward to define than its beginning, and Prettejohn aptly invokes the multiplicity of strands—radical and reactionary—that grew from the Pre-Raphaelite germ.

The “Studies in Pre-Raphaelitism,” which constitute the second part of the book, offer intensive readings of the key themes of realism and gender-sexuality. These are the areas in which scholars have been most active in recent years, and Prettejohn is generally successful in the delicate balancing act of matching ideological and sociohistorical readings of individual works with her broader revisionist claims about aesthetic quality and modernity. Although there is no absolute theoretical collision between these two methodological paradigms, in practice they have tended to operate as Manichaean opposites. Only in her disappointingly lightweight final chapter, “Contexts for Pre-Raphaelitism,” does Prettejohn advance a more polemical argument. She asserts that in existing readings of Brown's Work, which invoke a contextual matrix of contemporary thinking on the subject of labor, “figures and objects in the picture appear to `illustrate' social meanings that are outside the image” (p. 236). Yet here Prettejohn lapses into a tendentious misreading of the project of a contextual art history. As she acknowledges, any attempt at an iconographic reading of these works (a level of reading that is surely necessary, if by no means sufficient) must draw on contemporary sources, written and material, in order to identify and interpret the objects and figures so meticulously represented. However, to place the painting within a matrix of references that allow its meanings to speak is neither to deny its visuality nor to assert the primacy of the preexisting verbal archive over the image. There is no contradiction between interpreting each individual element in the composition and giving equal weight to issues such as the hysterical elaboration of the painting, its disconcertingly overcrowded composition, and its deliberate allusion to, and overwhelming reconfiguration of, compositional precedents such as Raphael's School of Athens. Formal analysis, though underplayed in many sociohistorical readings of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, is, in the end, a blunt instrument with which to address the precision of meaning and allusion so profusely embedded in so complex an image as Work. It reveals only confusion and leads to a reading of the work (as here) that simply recycles the idea that the painting is itself confusing. If Prettejohn's own interpretation of this protean painting disappoints, this is only in relation to the many insights contained elsewhere in her text.

Prettejohn's account insists, rightly, that “The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites” was high art, whose ambitions and achievements rank with the greatest of the era. One aspect of Pre-Raphaelite modernity she shuns, however, is the significant relationships that bind Pre-Raphaelite style and iconography not only to photography but to the broader popular visual culture of the period. This was an era in which popular graphic media burgeoned in line with the increasing speed and diversity of the technologies of their production and distribution, from the steam press to W. H. Smith's railway bookstalls. To what extent did the Pre-Raphaelites (themselves active in the creation of illustrations for large-circulation periodicals) respond to these new visual technologies and scopic regimes of industrial modernity? And how should visual culture studies intersect with art history? Kate Flint's The Victorians and the Visual Imagination is a loose-knit collection of essays, mostly published before in different forms, which casts its evidential net much wider than Prettejohn's study, with different aims in mind. Flint includes major and minor oil paintings, caricatures from Punch, crude wood-engraved illustrations from Sophia de Morgan's From Matter to Spirit (1863), and even an advertisement for Sozodont toothpaste. This eclectic mixture of imagery is considered alongside an equally impressive variety of texts in search of Victorian concepts of vision and the visual. Flint's major concern (like Prettejohn’s) is seeing itself—the act of vision.

Like much of her book, Flint's opening essay deals not so much with the visible as the invisible, in a stimulating discussion of the meanings of dust in Victorian fiction. Dust could signify the detritus of labor on the clothing of a working man or the swirling sands of the desert in a colonial war. It was as inevitable a feature of the streets of Victorian London as Henry Mayhew's laboring poor and was eventually transformed into Ruskin's ominous “Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.” But although dust is apprehended visually as well as by touch, smell, and feeling, and Flint has gathered a remarkable collection of references to demonstrate this, there is little in her book of the directly visual analysis for which Prettejohn appeals. Rather, she identifies key Victorian cultural tropes and moves from instance to instance, an additive rather than argumentative structure. Particularly rich are Flint's accounts of the importance of ice and glaciers for Victorian viewers; of hallucinations in a range of paintings including Millais's extraordinary Speak! Speak!; and of the Gothic idea of the buried city, the life of the sewers and the poor under the arches. This panoramic eclecticism of source material is occasionally won at the expense of close contextual readings of individual works; indeed the project of analyzing “Victorian” culture as a whole in this way is problematic, even in a book of substantial length. The “Victorian” period, as defined here, covers three quarters of a century of rapid and intense change, and there is a danger of ascribing to it too great a unity and coherence. What is present is inevitably dwarfed by what is left out, notably about the novel technologies in which the period was so prolific. Furthermore, in contrast to Prettejohn's book, too little is said here about either the stylistic characteristics or the relative aesthetic quality of the individual objects under consideration, which are leveled out into a single category of “imagery.” There is a danger of collapsing hierarchies (visual-verbal; high art–popular culture) of which the educated Victorian viewer would have been acutely aware. Despite these problems in its underlying project, treated as a series of essays, rather than an argument based on a single proposition, Flint's book is profoundly revealing of the multiple strands of visuality in Victorian Britain.

A third area in which there has been considerable activity in recent years is the history of art institutions, formalized arenas not only for looking at art but, then as now, institutions that observe and regulate the behavior of visitors forming a “public for art.” An increasingly burgeoning literature—exemplified by Carol Duncan's Civilising Rituals (1995) and Tony Bennett's The Birth of the Museum (1995)—has adopted a Foucauldian analysis of the museum as an essentially regulatory and repressive apparatus linked to governmental functions of social control and to the projection of state and imperial ideologies. Central to this argument is the familiar model of the panopticon, with its radical control and manipulation of vision and the gaze. A new collection of essays, Governing Cultures: Art Institutions in Victorian London, the latest in a series of works edited by Paul Barlow and Colin Trodd, aims to dislodge this perspective in favor of a more idealistic reading of cultural institutions, in which the original claims of museums “that moral and aesthetic improvement might be effected by the gallery” (p. 157) are taken seriously. Assembled in this volume are twelve case studies examining all the major art institutions of Victorian London—including the familiar pre-Victorian foundations such as the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, and the watercolor societies. Also included is a useful study of the last days of the aristocratic exhibiting society, the British Institution, before its demise in 1867. Products of the mid-Victorian era such as the National Portrait Gallery and the Art-Union, a fine-art lottery that was widely imitated around the world, naturally play a central role. The best essays, such as those by Emma Chambers on the Slade School of Art and Lara Perry on the National Portrait Gallery, make substantial, and theoretically informed, analytical points based on detailed archival research, and many of the chapters are—one can only hope—preludes to full-length studies of these central art institutions about which we know relatively little.

Trodd and Barlow's introduction, and the claims made there for this volume, are, however, more problematic and lack the incisive clarity that characterizes the chapters. The editors make an important claim for the multiple, complex, and often incoherent projects of the institutions under discussion and rightly disparage the oversimplification implicit in many Foucauldian readings of cultural institutions. The introduction also problematizes the notion of the “public” for art in nineteenth-century London. But the underlying thesis seems to be an attempt to refurbish a Reynoldsian notion of the public art, although there is little discussion of this matter in the subsequent chapters, which are, indeed, only loosely related to the introduction.

A major disappointment is the book's treatment of perhaps the most important of all Victorian cultural institutions museums, the South Kensington Museum. Largely reliant on secondary sources, Barlow and Shelagh Wilson's insubstantial essay “Consuming Empire” adds little to the growing literature in this field. Invoked here, as in the introduction to the volume, are the two frescoes, The Arts of Industry as Applied to War and to Peace, that Fredric Leighton painted on the walls of the South Kensington (now Victoria and Albert) Museum. These works are, indeed, positioned so as to become as emblematic of the book's project. Attention to these frescoes, as prime examples of the iconography of museum decoration in the Victorian period, is welcome. For Trodd and Barlow (in opposition to my earlier reading of them), these works do not engage with the world in which they were created—that of industrial capitalism—nor do they relate meaningfully to the stated aims of the museum in which they were painted, which were to improve the quality of contemporary design of industrial manufactures. They claim that “Leighton presents us with a variant of a civic humanist vision, one which is in keeping with the Reynoldsian mode of History Painting and an endless theorization and embodiment of the beautiful” (p. 23). Set, respectively, in Renaissance Florence and in Ancient Greece, the frescoes certainly do not directly represent contemporary industrial production, but nor do they embody a heroic ideal or indeed any form of coherent narrative or emblem as demanded by Reynolds. Trodd and Barlow are, indeed, largely silent as to the content and meaning of the images and prefer to allude to them in the most general of terms, ignoring the broader iconographic scheme of the South Court of which they are a part. Closer attention to the objects themselves would produce a more compelling interpretation. It speaks volumes that Trodd and Barlow misidentify the two grisaille oil paintings they reproduce (which are wrongly captioned here as frescoes), misdate them, and reproduce both images in reverse.

Prettejohn's study is a call to arms for students of this period, whose sheer brio and confidence persuades the reader that studies in Victorian art have come of age. The work of Flint, along with studies by Lynda Nead and others, enriches the broader field of Victorian visual culture, in particular by drawing attention to visual aspects of the cultural geography of the Victorian city. The growth in archive-based institutional studies of the wider Victorian art world—not only museums, but the art market, exhibitions, and collecting in general—is also a welcome development. There remains, however, not only a vast and virtually untouched archive of visual culture, but also a large corpus of works of art of the highest quality, awaiting serious study. The demise of art historical modernism has paid a rich dividend for the study of once-scorned Victorian art, with virtually limitless potential for future research and analysis.