As someone who knows nothing about art, I can say that the untrained eye sees nothing controversial about this painting. It seems painted in that old classical style in which people look real. It's got a lovely religious story to it that is common in old paintings.
John Millais was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a small group of artists that secretly rebelled against the leading Royal Academy's ideas of painting and sculpture. The Pre-Raphaelites claimed they wanted to leave behind the mechanical way of painting that began after Raphael. The Pre-Raphaelites strove to create beautiful detail and color in their paintings rather than purposely have muddied areas.
It did not always go over well. Christ in the House of His Parents was seen as sacrilegious, portraying Jesus in a common and humanly manner. Everyone knew Christ was to wear a toga and a halo. What on earth was Millais thinking?
A review commonly quoted from "The Royal Academy Exhibition" says the painting was a "painful display" of a "red-headed Jew boy." It also states that shavings should not be found at the feet of the holy family, and Mary should not be a common seamstress.
Jesus as a Jew! Oh no! Burn the painting! Charles Dickens even had a good two cents to put in.
In the foreground of that carpenter's shop is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy in a bed- gown; who appears to have received a poke in the hand, from the stick of another boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England.
--Charles Dickens in magazine Household Words, June 1850.
Now that I've stuffed your head full of abstract concepts and criticism, try to be objective and tell me what you think of the painting.
7 comments:
I think it's nice. Warm colors, realistic portrayals.
Why can't anybody ever paint anything without there being ridiculous amounts of analysis and debate over it?
Maybe the guy just wanted to impress a girl.
"What did you go out to see?"
Analysis shares and spreads ideas, enlightening some and, perhaps, irritating others.
I wonder what really bothered Charles Dickens. Was it the commonness of the family or the too balanced scene itself? Was it that the mother was so plain? She certainly isn't ugly. Was the red hair too incongruous or was it that only the symbolism fit the event and, therefore, the "reality" wasn't real? (Good heavens, Kathryn looks more Jewish than any of the folks here. It must be her Mediterranean heritage.)
I like the picture just because it makes me imagine their everyday life. Of course, I see them more as stoneworkers, but the idea is there.
I have now entered the ridiculous quantity stage. Jordan wins.
Maybe the guy just wanted to tell a story.
Mom
I don't know that a guy who set up a rebellious brotherhood then publicly displays his art in the same society he secretly hates counts as just telling a story.
Henry Holiday, who illustrated Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" and associated himself with the Prerephaelite Brotherhood, seemingly took an unusual interest in Millais' drawing:
http://www.snrk.de/MillaisHoliday.pdf
Regarts from Munich
Goetz
http://www.snrk.de/EvaPeteri.htm is a shortlink to books.google which points to a chapter on that drawing in Eva Peteri's "Victorian Approaches to Religion as Reflected in the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites" (Budapest 2003, ISBN 978-9630580380). Don't get confused by the title in books.google, they eratically mixed it up with annother book title. (Goetz, 2009-12-26)
Post a Comment