You know a Pre-Raphaelite picture when you see one, but definitions come hard. The paintings are likely to be detailed, but Rossetti's are soft and generalised; they often take subjects from English poetry or the Bible, but can be pure landscapes, or illustrations of Greek myths, or even about modern politics. The Pre-Raphaelite programme - to replace an exhausted tradition, of painterly conventionalities and trivial subject-matter, with a style which paid close attention to the detail of natural appearances and took themes of an aesthetically and morally elevated sort - is clear enough. The results evoke responses which are nothing like as simple.

LRB 18 March 1982 | PDF Download