Visual Culture in Britain: Ayla Lepine
Visual Culture in Britain: Ayla Lepine
Visual Culture in Britain: Ayla Lepine
Ayla Lepine
To cite this article: Ayla Lepine (2017) Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from
the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War, by Elizabeth Prettejohn, New Haven, CN and London:
Yale University Press, 2017, pp. 288, £45, Hardback, Visual Culture in Britain, 18:3, 410-413, DOI:
10.1080/14714787.2017.1363520
Article views: 30
In 1895, the painter and critic (and cousin of the writer, Robert Louis
Stevenson) R.A.M. Stevenson published a book in which he explored
Velásquez as a truly modern artist. Stevenson interpreted Velásquez’s
technique through the lens of Impressionism, and referenced his fin-de-
siècle contemporaries as Impressionist revivalists. In the midst of
Elizabeth Prettejohn’s discussion of the significance of Spanish Old
Masters for Frederic Leighton in both his Royal Academy lectures and
many of his most substantial paintings, Stevenson’s views signal
Prettejohn’s own focus on how time, memory, imitation, and influence
are at work in British art history. She notes that for Stevenson,
‘Impressionism as an artistic movement is thus projected back to
Velásquez as its initiator, and its modern manifestation becomes a
“revival”, like the Pre-Raphaelite revival of early Renaissance painting,
rather than a modernist break with the past’ (183). This insight invites
new readings of late nineteenth-century historicism, fruitfully compli-
cating narratives of modernism that characterize the art-historical scho-
larly landscape on both sides of the English Channel. By exploring
questions of reference, allusion, and the deployment of the history of
art as a flexible tool in the production of new paintings, it is not only
possible but deeply right to probe what links might truly exist between
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, John Singer Sargent, and Pablo Picasso. For
artists, as well as for nineteenth-century curators, scholars, and collec-
tors, it was essential and truly modern to establish meaningful relation-
ships with Old Masters as no less than anachronic partners in
innovative paintings that delivered truly new messages regarding sub-
jects as diverse as love, God, literature, archaeology, and colour.
Prettejohn’s Modern Painters, Old Masters contends that, from the mid-
nineteenth century until well into the twentieth, British art’s relation-
ships with Old Master European painting were a precious resource for
the production of radically original work. From Ford Madox Brown to
William Orpen, artists turned again and again to the glorious riches of
the Italian Renaissance and to Spanish early modernism, many of which
were readily accessible for lengthy and nuanced study in a growing
array of regional public art galleries and national collections, as well as
in prints and watercolour studies (230). Quoting David Hume’s Georgian
rhetorical question, ‘Must we throw aside the pictures of our ancestors,
because of their ruffs and farthingales?’ at the outset of her project,
Prettejohn responds with a firm and appealing negative.1 For the artists
Ayla Lepine
University of Essex
Ó Ayla Lepine, 2017
Notes
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973).
Nagel, Alexander and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York:
Zone Books, 2010).