Victorian Painting

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Victorian Painting

Victorian painting was made up of several schools including the Romantics, the Realists and the Pre-Raphaelites. Recurring topics included fallen women, fairies, family scenes, historical scenes, landscapes and portraits (Sporre 509-511; Victorian Web).

Romantic painters focused on escaping the rules of classical composition and opening up painting to imagination and individual drama. It was not meant to be objective. The Romantics also discovered the power and importance of color as opposed to shape and form (Sporre 489-90). Two well-known British Romantic painters whose works fit this ideal were Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) and John Constable (1776-1837). Turner’s most famous work is The Slave Ship (1840), based on the real event of a sea captain throwing out sick slaves into the sea so that he could collect the insurance money (Turner’s The Slave Ship.2). In this painting, color clearly dominates over form and the sea, sky and sun seem to merge. There are no clear delineations between the elements. (Flynn; Sporre 493; Tansey 950-51). Landscape paintings were also very popular in this era, and Constable was one of the most noted landscape painters. He was interested in color, but tried to reproduce the scenes he painted scientifically onto the canvas. This focus made his paintings very realistic (Sporre 511; Tansey 952-53).

The Realists and the Pre-Raphaelites were the other two important movements in Victorian painting. Both paid extreme attention to details (Sporre 510). John Evrett Millais' (1829-1896) Ophelia (1852) is a good example of Realism (Millais’ Ophelia. 3). Even if his subject is from a play, his attention to detail draws strongly from the Realist techniques (Flynn; Tansey 975-76). Dante Gabriel Rossetti is probably the most well known Pre-Raphaelite painter. His paintings almost always represented women. An acclaimed example of his work can be found his paintings for Goblin Market (1862), a poem written and published by his sister, Christina Rossetti (1830-1894).

The Victorian era had numerous painters that produced a multitude of works. Its variety of styles and topics were precursors to the movements of Impressionism and Abstract painting which were to follow (Sporre 511).

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