Desperate Romantics? The only desperate thing about the pre-Raphaelites was their truly bad art | Ar

Although one might agree with Franny Moyle, author of Desperate Romantics, and with whoever it was at the BBC who decided that the TV series should have the same name, that the pre-Raphaelites were desperate, the notion that they were romantic (whether you spell it with a big or a small r) is nonsense. Not

Art This article is more than 14 years old

Desperate Romantics? The only desperate thing about the pre-Raphaelites was their truly bad art

This article is more than 14 years old

Although one might agree with Franny Moyle, author of Desperate Romantics, and with whoever it was at the BBC who decided that the TV series should have the same name, that the pre-Raphaelites were desperate, the notion that they were romantic (whether you spell it with a big or a small r) is nonsense. Not that anyone at the BBC cares; the intention was to smuggle pretentious pornography on to the small screen in prime time and get away with it. Job done.

All the genuine Romantics, except Wordsworth, were dead before any of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was born. Quintessentially Victorian, the PRB was not even an exciting innovation: it followed in the footsteps of the German Brotherhood of St Luke. The Nazarenes, as they were known because of their affectations in dress, led the rediscovery of the German medieval past and of the original Mastersinger, Hans Sachs, without which Die Meistersinger could never have happened. Or the Nuremberg rallies. German art did eventually grow up, and the Brotherhood of St Luke is now all but forgotten. Unfortunately, the PRB is still with us. The really bad news is that Tate Britain is considering putting on a huge exhibition of pre-Raphaelite art as the best imaginable visual arts accompaniment to the Olympics in 2012. It will be obvious to many that, while France was experiencing the dazzle of the impressionists, Britons were happy to applaud and reward the false sentiment, fancy dress and finicking pseudo-realism of a dreary horde of pre-Raphaelites.

The PRB led its followers into a welter of truly bad art: stultified, inauthentic, meretricious and vulgar. Where the Nazarenes went for luminosity, simplicity and piety, the PRB wallowed in elaboration, erotic suggestion and overheated colour. If they hadn't had sex with their models, they wanted you to think they had. They realised pretty early on that nudes are not erotic; their languorous models drooped, swooned, gasped and died in ever more elaborate, flowing gowns shot through with new synthetic colours: arsenic greens, cobalt blues, alizarin crimsons. The PRB painted to advertise themselves, hoping that rights to their pictures would be bought by newspaper proprietors, who would merchandise cheap prints. It was only a matter of time before a manufacturer would use a pre-Raphaelite picture to advertise his product. The lucky painter was Millais, whose A Child's World was used by Pears to advertise its soap under the title Bubbles, but not until 1886, far outside the time-frame of Desperate Romantics. For the BBC, historical accuracy is not an issue, and so the Bubbles affair gets brought in at least 20 years too soon.

It is possible to succeed as a fake primitive with little talent or training, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti did. Among the artists who followed the PRB to nowhere was an unprecedented number of women. They include Sophie Anderson, whose No Walk Today sold for £1,038,050 when it came up for auction at Sotheby's last November. Mostly the women painted the same sorts of costumed female figures as the men: full-length, half-length, whatever, with abundant sentiment but quite without desire. Rebecca Solomon, Joanna Mary Boyce, Marie Spartali Stillman, Emma Sandys, and Lucy and Catherine Madox Brown all painted innumerable Arthurian females, soulful saints, madonnas, fallen women, Dawns, Floras and the like. The women who worked steadily enough to create a complete oeuvre are Evelyn de Morgan, Marianne Stokes and Kate Bunce. Harder to find is the work of Rossetti's abused model, mistress and later wife, Elizabeth Siddall, whose art is strangely reminiscent of the spare, luminous compositions of the Nazarenes.

More male British artists than female ones reworked the PRB formula of knights, ladies, saints and sinners, in fancy dress and multicoloured innuendo, because it was popular and commercially successful. In 1888, when John Waterhouse painted Tennyson's Lady of Shalott in her robe of snowy white, loosing the chain of her boat, Manet was already dead, Cézanne was painting landscapes in Provence, Monet was in Giverny and Antibes, Gauguin and Van Gogh in Arles, and Pissarro at Eragny; none of them was making any money. Seurat had long ago painted La Grande Jatte. Fourteen years earlier, Alfred Sisley had spent four months painting the Thames near Molesey, but no English artist seems to have looked over his shoulder. In a letter, Monet, Pissarro, Degas, and Renoir all admitted that in "applying themselves with passion to the rendering of form in movement, as well as the fugitive phenomena of light", they had been preceded by "the illustrious Turner". The PRB paid no mind, but went on dressing their themed shop window. Turner was the desperate Romantic; the PRB were philistines.

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