Edward Burne-Jones, Victorian Artist-Dreamer

by Stephen Wildman

From Publishers Weekly
As a schoolboy in Birmingham, England, Burne-Jones was already signing his name "Edouard de Bymyngham"--an early romantic impulse borne out by the life and work of this second-generation Pre-Raphaelite and leader of the aesthetic movement, whose massive output of watercolor and oil paintings, intricate pencil drawings, tapestries, stained-glass windows and other decorative objects are gathered this summer at a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit in New York City

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John Everett Millais: Beyond the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

by Debra Mancoff

Book Description
Exploring such topics as Millais's position among contemporary artists; his active interests in theater, literature, and science; his life-long love of nature; his role as a celebrity and a popular artist; and his enduring fascination with the poignant specter of mortality, the book presents a portrait of Millais not limited by the parameters of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. It is a portrait of a supremely gifted artist, a rival of Frederic Leighton, and a counterpart to Alfred Lord Tennyson.

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Lawrence Alma-Tadema

by Rosemary J. Barrow

Book Description
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912), was one of the finest and most distinctive of the Victorian painters. Alma-Tadema, a knowledgeable student of antiquity, repeatedly used literary and archaeological allusions in his paintings to play a game of interpretation with his viewers. Time and again the seeming innocence of the scenes he depicts is subverted by a mischievously placed inscription or statue, suggesting to the initiated a darker and usually risque meaning. Neglected after his death, Alma-Tadema's paintings are once again admired for their beauty and their remarkable mastery of light, colour and texture. With its intriguing insights into his personality and intentions, this book should provide a challenging reassessment of a major artist.

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Bouguereau

by Fronia E. Wissman, Adolphe-William Bouguereau

Midwest Book Review
Fronia Wissman's Bouguereau offers astute and illuminating insights into his art, career, and family life of the French artist Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905) whose evocative visions of a better, purer time and place earned him a passionate following during his lifetime down through the present. 60 full color reproductions and 15 black & white illustrations perfectly exemplify Bouguereau's prodigious talent in creating works of sensual, emotional, and intellectual appeal. By the time of his death in 1905, Bouguereau was scorned by progressive painters and critics who saw in his works all that was wrong with the official French world of art, but he was also a favorite of collectors, who found in his paintings of bathers, nymphs, and shepherdesses a realm of eternal beauty far from contemporary life. Bouguereau displayed his talent for drawing at a very early age, became educated at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, was a highly successful portraitist, was exhibited at the Salon to an enthusiastic public, and had his work recognized and awarded at various European expositions during his life. Bouguereau is a beautiful tribute to an artist and would grace any art school, community, or personal art library!

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Albert Moore

by Robyn Asleson

Book Description
Albert Moore (1841-93) was one of the most important late Victorian artists. In a single-minded quest for aesthetic perfection, he employed the female figure to embody abstract systems of ideal beauty, and created many of the iconic and defining images of the Aesthetic Movement. Yet he has remained a shadowy figure. Based on original research and unpublished family documents, Robyn Asleson's monograph presents a fresh view of the artist's allegedly reclusive personality, and firmly establishes him as a major figure and a significant precursor of Modernism. This beautiful book is now issued in a paperback format that will bring the artist to a wide and appreciative audience.

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Goblin Market

by Christina Rossetti

A Prettily Presented Classic, August 23, 2005
Reviewer: Donna J. Eggett "Twowndrn" (Radford, VA). Noted Italian/English poetess of the 1800's, Christina Rossetti's imagination-catching poetry has stood the test of time, being still loved and studied today. Because of its title, Goblin Market sometimes gets put into a juvenile category, but this is a poem for mature readers. This moral tale depicts the epic struggle between bad and good. The goblin's onslaught on virtue immediately engages the reader's inner ear and heart. This poem is really gripping reading. Goblin Market is often considered Christina Rossetti's best poem. This re-issue, replete with noted illustrator Arthor Rackham's beautifully eerie drawings, is a book worth owning.

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Christina Rossetti's Faithful Imagination: The Devotional Poetry and Prose

by Dinah Roe

Book Description
This new study focuses on the critically neglected area of Rossetti's devotional poetry and her prose, offering a critical intervention in the feminist construction of an important Victorian woman poet.

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Christina Rossetti: Passion & Devastation (Illustrated Poetry Anthology) (Illustrated Poetry Anthology)

by Christina Georgina Rossetti, K. E. Sullivan

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Reclusive, melancholy poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) waged "a lifelong struggle with feminist desires" and attempted to reconcile ambition and autonomy with the Victorian ideal of womanhood, in Marsh's analysis. Rossetti, who believed herself descended from Petrarch's Laura (a claim with little if any foundation), campaigned against cruelty to animals, and her volunteer work with prostitutes at Highgate penitentiary inspired her allegorical poem Goblin Market. Marsh (The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood) illuminates Rossetti's sibling rivalry with her flamboyant brother, painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and shows how the despair and paranoia of their invalid father, Gabriele, an embittered Italian exile-poet-librettist-professor, helped trigger Christina's adolescent breakdown, which left her with a lifelong tendency to guilt and self-castigation. Quoting extensively from the poetry, Marsh unlocks Rossetti's intense inner life in an engrossing, nuanced biography. She also explores the poet's fanciful tales and devotional writings to uncover her private battle with grief and preoccupation with death.

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Poems and Prose Rossetti (Everyman's Library (Paper))

by Christina Rossetti

Book Description
Rossetti was considered by many of her contemporaries to be Britain's finest living poet; technically virtuous and full of mystic yearning, her poetry ranges from the immensely popular "Goblin Market" to ballads, love lyrics, sonnets, and religious poetry. This long awaited edition recalls a poet of breathtaking variety and strange magic to a public that has too long neglected her.

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Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood

by Jan Marsh

From Library Journal
This absorbing work, undiminished by its clear but reasoned feminist approach, is essential for serious collections in art history, women's studies, or literature. Three carefully researched chapters (``Youth,'' ``Marriage,'' ``Maturity'') reconstruct the forgotten lives of six women who were integral to the pre-Raphaelite movement. Elizabeth Sidall, Emma Madox Borwn, Annie Miller, Fanny Cornforth, Janey Morris, and Georgiana Burne-Jones are validated as individuals with their own lives and creative needs, not simply as romanticized adjuncts to their better-known male companions. Interestingly enough, despite their putative beauty and allure, these women were often chosen as models because of their plainness or availability; yet they became the Victorian feminine ideal. Recommended. Robin Kaplan, M.L.S., The Information Group, Los Angeles
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Jane Morris: The Pre-Raphaelite Model of Beauty

by Debra N. Mancoff

a pre-raphaelite fan, May 30, 2003
Reviewer: historybooklady (USA) - See all my reviews
Highly recommend this book. The text is well written and it gives a nice overview of Jane's life and the Pre-Raphaelite artists she came to know personally through the years. Photos and prints are an asset to the book.

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The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites

by Elizabeth Prettejohn

From Booklist
As Prettejohn notes, so much has been written on those mid-nineteenth-century English art radicals, the Pre-Raphaelites, that some bookstores have separate sections to accommodate all the tomes about them. How could anything exciting remain to be said about them? Well, for many art lovers, what Prettejohn says will be pretty intriguing. She takes the extreme reactions to Pre-Raphaelite painting, then and now, seriously; looks again and more thoroughly at the meticulous realism, even lighting, clashing colors, and multiple foci in their paintings; and suggests a new story about the development of modern art, from Pre-Raphaelitism to symbolism to surrealism to pop art to postmodernism. If that doesn't pique art book readers' interest, perhaps Prettejohn's attention to the female Pre-Raphaelites, or her consideration of gender and sexuality in Pre-Raphaelite art, or the luscious reproductions of virtually all the famous and many lesser-known but entrancing Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces will. Art libraries, consider this book essential. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Lizzie Siddal: Face of the Pre-Raphaelites: Face of the Pre-Raphaelites

by Lucinda Hawksley

From Booklist
Tall, slender, red-haired, large-eyed, and regal, the striking young woman known as Lizzie Siddal was working in a London millinery shop when she attracted the fanatic attention of painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the seven brash young artists who formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, declaring that art had "gone wrong" with the great painter Raphael. The romantic if morbid group is best remembered for Rossetti's many portraits of Lizzie, his magnificent obsession. But as Hawksley so crisply documents, for all his adoration, Rossetti was unfaithful and cruel, and Lizzie suffered chronic -anxiety-induced ailments and a wicked addiction to laudanum, dying at 32 in 1862. And still Rossetti's selfishness knew no bounds: he arranged for a ghoulish exhumation of her body to retrieve a poetry manuscript. Writing with authority, energy, and covert wit and indignation, Hawksley offers a fresh and affecting perspective on this still scandalous and tragic story. She relishes the strong personalities involved and their intriguing milieu and subtly guides readers to consider timeless questions pertaining to beauty and power, love and ambition. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists

by Jan Marsh, Pamela Gerrish Nunn

Book Description
The work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their followers is enduringly popular and correspondingly familiar to a wide public. Works by women artists within the Pre-Raphaelite style have, however, largely been forgotten and ignored in the history of the movement. This book, published to accompany an exhibition in Manchester, England, brings together paintings, drawings, photographs, and other works that women contributed to the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Many are reproduced and documented here for the first time. Spanning three generations from the 1840s to the early 1900s, the artists include Barbara Bodichon, Anna Howitt, Rosa Brett, Anna Blunden, Jane Benham Hay, Joanna Boyce, Elizabeth Siddal, Rebecca Solomon, Emma Sandys, Julia Margaret Cameron, Lucy and Catherine Madox Brown, Marie Spartali Stillman, Maria Zambaco, Francesca Alexander, Evelyn De Morgan, Kate Bunce, Marianne Stokes, Christina Herringham, and Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale. Their works demonstrate that Pre-Raphaelitism is a broader historical movement than has previously been recognized and that women were active in all its phases. Their re-inclusion in Pre-Raphaelite history will redefine its scope, concerns, and achievements, as well as restore a wealth of neglected works to public attention.

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Pre-Raphaelites at Home

by Pamela Todd

Book Description
Set against the background of an opulent and affluent Victorian art establishment, Pre-Raphaelites at Home tells the story of a fiery group of artists whose ideas-which were seen as revolutionary-and avant-garde lifestyle-deemed impossibly bohemian-were at odds with the conventional wisdom of the time.

Led by the charismatic Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the semi-secret Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood attracted some of the most colorful and complex personalities of the age, including William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Ford Madox Brown, and Edward Burne-Jones. These artists took their creative inspiration not from the works of other painters, but directly from nature. Female beauty was central to their art; friendship, to their lives.

The lively, entertaining narrative is lavishly illustrated throughout with beautiful color reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, as well as wonderful photographs of the artists and their homes and studios.

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Pre-Raphaelites & Their World

by Rachel Barnes

Swell Introductory Text, April 10, 2000
Reviewer: Buddha-Buoy "Buddha-Buoy" (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
Ms. Barnes's coffee-table book is a superb addition to the general art-lover's library. Lush illustrations and accessible prose make this book the perfect introduction to the men and art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

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Pre-Raphaelites in Love

by Gay Daly

From Publishers Weekly
Behind the dreamlike women in Pre-Raphaelite paintings stood the artists' flesh-and-blood models with whom they often became romantically involved. %u2026Daly, who has taught women's studies, presents an often touching, sometimes hilarious, always engrossing portrait of the high-minded Victorian Brotherhood, their romances and their almost incestuous cross-connections.. This is amorous biography at its witty, perceptive best. Illustrated.

The art of love., March 19, 2002
Reviewer: G. Merritt (Boulder, CO)
"Each is a psychological and aesthetic puzzle," Gay Daly writes about the women who modeled for the Pre-Raphaelite painters. "One woman sits with eyes closed in a religious trance that seems to border on sexual ecstasy. Another, longing for an absent lover, stretches like a langorous tiger, her voluptuous body wrapped in a dress of rich royal blue velvet that dominates the canvas, insisting that the viewer dwell on her curves." The "beautiful" and equally "disturbing" women they painted came from almost every class and corner of London. Among them were the "spoiled, petted daughter of a solicitor, a hearty, motherly prostitute, a wily barmaid, and the daughter of a Methodist minister" (p. xix).

Although it was challenging to locate a copy of Daly's out-of-print book, her study of the Pre-Raphaelites was as interesting to read as a Victorian novel. She insightfully examines Victorian social values and marriage, and reveals that the romantic lives of the Pre-Raphaelites were just as mesmerizing as their luminous paintings.

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Flora Symbolica: Flowers in Pre-Raphaelite Art

by Debra N. Mancoff

Book Description
This stunning bouquet of romantic paintings brings together two important aspects of Victorian life-the pre-Raphaelite movement and the language of flowers-in one exquisite volume.

Few artistic movements capture classic notions of beauty as romantically as the Pre-Raphaelites-a group of nineteenth-century painters and poets who aimed to revive the purer art of the late medieval period. Brilliantly colored and carefully composed, pre-Raphaelite paintings are revered for their idealistic portrayal of women, their emphasis on nature and morality, and their use of literature and mythology. Flowers figure prominently in many of these paintings, the blooms as physically lush as they are laden with symbolism. For this was the Victorian era, when the language of flowers was spoken by everyone.

In this beautiful volume, Debra N. Mancoff, an expert on Pre-Raphaelite art and the floral lexicon presents forty breathtaking examples, which illuminate the meaning of flowers in all aspects of Victorian culture. She offers brief commentaries on individual paintings as well as biographies of the period's leading artists and their models. A captivating introduction to an artistic movement, this exquisitely produced book is also a romantic keepsake of an artistic sensibility that speaks volumes.

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Pre-raphaelites at the Office

by Carol McKendrick

From coping with a jammed photocopier to enjoying a rushed lunch hour and struggling home on overcrowded public transport, this witty "art" book follows a working day in the life of the Pre-Raphaelites. Eighty well-known Pre-Raphaelite paintings are transformed, with a few office supply catalogues and a little creativity, into everyday scenes at the office.

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Pre-Raphaelite Cats

by Susan Herbert

Book Description
Susan Herbert's feline versions of famous paintings have found an appreciative audience among both cat and art lovers. It was inevitable that she should be attracted to the works of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Well-known works by such artists as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Holman Hunt can be viewed in a new and entrancing way when their protagonists are endearing cats. A special feature of this book is its inclusion of black-and-white reproductions of all the original paintings that have inspired Herbert. They afford interesting and surprising comparisons, concluding a book of irresistible delights on every page.

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