The Poetry of Drawing

Overview

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood have a bit of reputation for being kinda sissy; all chicks looking moody in historical dress-ups and stuff.  Art for and about women upon whom dudes project pretty heavily, one might say. But the PRB (not to be confused with PBR) do have their claims to badassery and virtuosity. They basically declared that painting from Raphael onward was overly precious, unnatural and dishonest. And they had a pretty legit set of goals, viz.

- To have genuine ideas to express
- To study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them
- To sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parodying and learned by rote
- Most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues

Their emphasis on quality and truth entailed a high degree of technical rigour, and this show zeroes in on the role of drawing in that return to what the Brotherhood regarded as the more wholesome and legit aesthtics of the Quattrocento. Doing things properly, in a Pre-Raphaelite way, was a pretty thorough process that involved doing sketches and studies and putting in details and working as closely as possible from physical recreations of the scenes they wanted to depict, so it was important to be able to draw well and they ended up drawing a lot, from basic sketches to fully-resolved watercolours.

Image: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1876. Edward Robert Hughes, 1893.