Victorian painting, the art of Britain under Queen Victoria (1837-1901), culminated in Victorian Neoclassicism, with its luminous visions of antiquity, and in a late Victorian Romanticism of legend, chivalry and dream. Both offered idealized beauty, highly finished and often on a large scale, as industrial Britain grew grimmer. The buyers were the new manufacturers and merchants, who preferred modern British pictures to old masters, and the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition was the great event of the year. In 1858 a rail had to hold back the crowds before William Powell Frith’s Derby Day (1856-1858, Tate Britain), a panorama of racegoers of every class.
The reign opened in the afterglow of Romanticism. J. M. W. Turner, the leading living British painter, showed a veteran warship towed to the breakers in The Fighting Temeraire (1839) and a train rushing through rain in Rain, Steam and Speed (1844), both in the National Gallery, London. Younger artists found him old-fashioned, but John Ruskin defended him in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843). Edwin Landseer made the Scottish Highlands a Romantic stage of stags and mist, as in The Monarch of the Glen (1851, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh), and the engraving rights to his pictures often fetched several times their sale price. Richard Dadd, confined after killing his father in 1843, painted the minute fairy world of The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (1855-1864, Tate Britain).
In the 1870s, during the Long Depression, many painters turned from storytelling and Pre-Raphaelite detail to beauty for its own sake, a creed set out in Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873). In 1877 Sir Coutts Lindsay opened the Grosvenor Gallery for artists the Royal Academy overlooked. There Ruskin saw James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold - The Falling Rocket (1875, Detroit Institute of Arts) and wrote that Whistler was demanding two hundred guineas for hurling paint at the public. Whistler sued in 1878, won a farthing in damages and was bankrupted by the costs. That year Frederic Leighton became president of the Royal Academy and opened its exhibitions to younger artists and new styles.
Victorian Neoclassicism grew from this turn and from the ancient sculpture of the British Museum, above all the Elgin Marbles; the number of students drawing in the museum rose more than fivefold in the 1870s. Earlier revivals had seen antiquity as heroic and virile, but these painters preferred quiet, mostly female figures in the spirit of the Venus de Milo. Their models stand, sit or recline almost motionless, with calm, absent faces, among marble seats, bronze vessels and a deep blue sea. Colors are bright rather than stony, partly because excavations had shown that ancient statues were once painted; G. F. Watts had seen colored fragments unearthed at the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus.
Frederic Leighton (1830-1896) painted Greek subjects with polished, idealized form, as in The Bath of Psyche (1890, Tate Britain) and Flaming June (1895, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico), a sleeper curled in translucent orange drapery. In January 1896 he became the first painter raised to the peerage, the day before he died. Lawrence Alma-Tadema, born in the Netherlands and settled in London from 1870, re-created daily life in ancient Rome with marble rendered so exactly that it seems cool. In The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888, private collection) an emperor smothers his guests in petals. Edward Poynter showed a Roman sentry keeping his post as Pompeii is buried in Faithful unto Death (1865, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), while Albert Moore arranged draped figures for harmonies of color alone.
Victorian Romanticism looked to the Middle Ages that Walter Scott’s novels had made popular, and to myth and allegory. Edward Burne-Jones, who had lost his religious faith, told Oscar Wilde that the more materialistic science became, the more angels he would paint. G. F. Watts set a blindfolded woman on a globe, playing a lyre with a single remaining string, in Hope (1886, Tate Britain). John William Waterhouse joined the open-air manner of Jules Bastien-Lepage to ancient and medieval legend, as in Hylas and the Nymphs (1896, Manchester Art Gallery). Edmund Blair Leighton painted knights and ladies with glossy precision, as in God Speed (1900, private collection), and John Atkinson Grimshaw painted moonlit docks and lanes glowing with gaslight.
The opening in 1897 of the Tate Gallery, built for the sugar merchant Henry Tate’s collection of modern British art, was the last triumph of the age. Leighton and Millais died in 1896, Burne-Jones in 1898 and the Queen in 1901. By 1915 the word Victorian had become a term of scorn, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) made the age a target of satire, and modernist critics looked to French art. In 1963 Flaming June came on the London market for just £50. The dealer Jeremy Maas could not interest a museum and sold it to the Puerto Rican industrialist Luis A. Ferré; it is now the centerpiece of the museum in Ponce.
