Pre-Raphaelite Sisters
National Portrait Gallery, London Until January 26
Though the group of 19th-century British painters known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were all men, women occupied unusually prominent positions in their world.
Their images of women are unique and unmistakable, and often represent the same three or four models. More than that, the Brotherhood were often connected to, and admired by, strong-minded women.
Their sisters, wives and sometimes professional associates made their way in the art and culture of the time as best they could.
The most haunting figure here is Elizabeth Siddal, the model for John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (above), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s great love
The National Portrait Gallery has turned the Pre-Raphaelite world on its head, and centred an exhibition on 12 women connected with the movement. Some were accomplished artists themselves, such as Evelyn de Morgan, Maria Zambaco, Joanna Boyce Wells and Marie Spartali Stillman.
One, Christina Rossetti, was a great writer. Others were models, some but not all of whom embarked on relationships with the painters and artists. It’s the faces of Elizabeth Siddal, Annie Miller, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris that summon up the Pre-Raphaelite world above all, and the Jamaican-born model Fanny Eaton usefully complicates our ideas of their world.
Finally, there are Georgiana Burne-Jones and Effie Millais, constant presences within their husbands’ world of images. Perhaps, this exhibition ambitiously suggests, they could have been artists of some skill themselves.
Realistically, the woman here who might be regarded as in the first rank is Joanna Boyce Wells, who died tragically young (Above, Head Of Mrs Eaton by Joanna Boyce Wells, 1861)
The argument, it must be said, is stretched a little. Realistically, the woman here who might be regarded as in the first rank is Joanna Boyce Wells, who died tragically young.
Her portraits are extraordinary, especially two of very small children, both exquisitely precise and of a hallucinatory strangeness. Of Evelyn de Morgan, Edward Burne-Jones said that her pictures were ‘a bore and an anomaly’, beautiful in individual details but ‘at distance the whole has no beauty of colour at all’.
That’s pretty accurate.
The works of Marie Spartali Stillman, too, are derivative and technically weak; Maria Zambaco’s work hardly survives at all, though her portrait medallions here show real ability.
I don’t think there is anything much to be said for the art by Georgiana Burne-Jones or Effie Millais, interesting figures though they are. The difficulties for a woman artist at the time – not really permitted to study anatomy, not able to go out independently to paint in the open air – were only surmounted by very few.
The spell is really cast by the formidable presence of the great models. The enchantment of their physical substance, the great weight of their hair, their often blank expressions and luminous, pale gaze created an ideal of female beauty and power that has never disappeared.
These were real women, not dreams, and their stories are often sad ones. Fanny Cornforth, willing to take on roles of moral depravity in the paintings, came to a sad end; the page of the mental hospital’s register describing her last days is on display and makes heartbreaking reading.
Annie Miller, the figure in Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience passed, too, out of history; when she died in the Twenties, no one had any idea who she was.
The most haunting figure here is Elizabeth Siddal, the model for John Everett Millais’ Ophelia, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s great love. Some of her art is here; not very impressive but burning with feeling.
She died young; Rossetti first placed manuscript poems in her coffin, then, after some years, dug it up and retrieved them. Like all the women here, we look at her powerful face (that was withholding who knows what feelings and knowledge) and have to conclude that she was there, dead or alive, to serve other people’s whims.
This is a compelling exhibition, and perhaps it speaks most powerfully through the art that was never permitted to be as good as it could have been.
Grayson Perry: Super Rich Interior Decoration
Victoria Miro Mayfair Until December 20
Rating: 
Grayson Perry has had so much limelight in recent years, it can be hard keeping up – from presenting Bafta-winning TV documentaries to starring in a stage show that toured nationwide.
Throw in collecting his CBE, and one might easily forget that Perry is, first and foremost, an artist.
A potter, to be precise, and this autumn he’s exhibiting 17 new works at Victoria Miro gallery in Mayfair. His subject matter is similar to that which he has been tackling in his non-artistic projects: British society.
Grayson Perry’s subject matter is similar to that which he has been tackling in his non-artistic projects: British society (Above, Thin Woman With Painting, 2019)
Perry loves looking at the state of the nation, albeit with tongue often slightly in cheek.
One vase, Vote Tory, features depictions of Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and friends amidst love-hearts and flowers. Perry says his inspiration was the fact that most, if not all, artists engaging with politics do so from a left-wing standpoint – and he wanted to imagine something from the right.
Mostly, though, Perry takes aim at the extremely rich.
References to tax havens like the Cayman Islands pop up, as do fast cars, designer handbags, and art collectors with more cash than taste. In a vase called Shopping For Meaning, Perry can be seen dressed as a super-wealthy woman outside a host of Bond Street shops.
Perry is renowned for his wit, but here the humour falls flat. He’s having a gentle dig at precisely the sort of people who buy precisely his sort of (expensive) art. ‘An artist’s job is to bite the hand that feeds him, but not too hard,’ Perry says.
His television shows succeeded by focusing on people of all backgrounds. This new exhibition, by contrast, feels like an in-joke between the artist and his collectors, leaving all the rest of us excluded.
Alastair Smart