LONDON.- The National Portrait Gallery, London is to stage the first-ever major exhibition to focus on the untold story of the women of Pre-Raphaelite art as part of a 2019 autumn season that also includes the first exhibition situating leading contemporary artist Elizabeth Peyton within the historical tradition of portraiture. Both exhibitions will include works on public display for the first time in the UK.
160 years after the first pictures were exhibited by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1849, Pre-Raphaelite Sisters (17 October 2019 – 26 January 2020), explores the overlooked contribution of twelve women who contributed to the movement in different ways. Featuring new discoveries and unseen works from public and private collections across the world, the exhibition reveals the women behind the pictures and their creative roles in Pre-Raphaelite’s successive phases between 1850 and 1900. Women, such as Joanna Wells (nee Boyce), a Pre-Raphaelite artist in her own right whose work has been largely omitted from the history of the movement, together with Marie Spartali Stillman and Evelyn de Morgan, whose art also shaped the development of Pre-Raphaelitism alongside their male counterparts. Previously unseen works including The First Meeting of Petrarch and Laura by Spartali Stillman, will be on public display for the first time alongside works such as Thou Bird of God by Wells, which hasn’t been exhibited for over 25 years.
Through paintings, photographs, manuscripts and personal items, Pre-Raphaelite Sisters also explores the significant roles women played as models, muses and helpmeets who supported and sustained the artistic output of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The exhibition tells the story of Annie Miller and Fanny Cornforth, who inspired and modelled for some of the most famous Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood paintings, and introduces Jamaican born model, Fanny Eaton, whose life story is presented in public for the first time.
Images L-R Fanny Eaton by Joanna Wells, 1861. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund; The First Meeting of Petrarch and Laura by Marie Spartali Stillman, 1889. Private Collection. Photo © Peter Nahum at The Leicester Galleries
Also featured is Christina Rossetti, the poet of Pre-Raphaelitism and a model for early paintings, and Effie Millais (nee Gray) and Georgiana Burne-Jones, whose domestic support underpinned their husbands’ artistic and social successes, while relinquishing their own ambitions in the process. For the first time Elizabeth Siddal, who famously modelled for John Everett Milliais’ Ophelia, is presented as an artist as well as a sitter, alongside Jane Morris and Maria Zambaco who also entered the art world as models, and later became individual muses and icons of the movement. Both Morris and Zambaco also created work of their own in pictures, embroidery and sculpture much of which will be on public display for the first time.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were young men aiming to overturn the conventions of Victorian Art. As the self-styled ‘Young Painters of England’ they challenged the previous generation with startling hues and compositions inspired by early renaissance painting. The names of John Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris are now well-known, and have become synonymous with the Romantic notion of the male genius. Pre-Raphaelite Sisters shows them in new light, both supportive of and dependent on the women in their lives and art.
Elizabeth Peyton (3 October 2019 – 5 January 2020), created in close collaboration with the artist, explores the development of Peyton’s unique portraiture from the 1990s to the present day, presenting works in a range of media, including new portraits exhibited for the first time. In addition to over 40 works on display in the exhibition, Peyton will become the first artist ever to be given the run of the entire National Portrait Gallery, with a selection of her portraits dispersed throughout the permanent Collection, juxtaposing Peyton’s paintings with historic portraits from the Tudor period onwards.
Images from L-R: The Age of Innocence by Elizabeth Peyton 2007 Courtesy The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT. USA © Elizabeth Peyton. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; Napoleon by Elizabeth Peyton 1991 © Elizabeth Peyton, courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London / Photography: Johansen Krause
Elizabeth Peyton is one of the world’s leading contemporary artists. Internationally renowned, her work has been at the forefront of a re-evaluation of figurative art and the tradition of portrait painting since the 1990s. The exhibition will include a selection of key portraits from the first two decades of her career, and investigate the new direction in her work over the last 10 years.
Peyton treats her subjects with a distinctive intimacy, whether they are friends, historical figures, or cultural icons. Portraits on display from her diverse and ever-expanding repertoire of recurring subjects will include Kurt Cobain, Liam Gallagher, Frida Kahlo, Napoleon, Queen Elizabeth II, David Bowie, Phoebe Philo, David Hockney, Eva-Maria Westbroek and Jonas Kaufmann among others. Peyton has made also made portraits after works by artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet and Edward Burne-Jones, which will be included in the exhibition.
Peyton’s recent works, derived both from life and from an increasingly wide range of secondary sources, including film, literature, music, visual art and opera, demonstrate how the artist has embraced a more expansive and abstract definition of portraiture over the last decade. The exhibition will look at the evolution of Peyton’s practice, exploring her unique aesthetic and her interrogation of perception, emotion and human relationships.
Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery London said: “I am delighted to announce these two new exhibitions for Autumn 2019, both of which will be viscerally beautiful and quietly political in highlighting the vital role women have played in shaping artistic movements and genres. I am particularly pleased to be collaborating with Elizabeth Peyton to bring her inimitable works to the National Portrait Gallery for the first time.”
Dr Jan Marsh, Curator of Pre-Raphaelite Sisters said: “When people think of Pre-Raphaelitism they think of beautiful women with lustrous hair and loose gowns gazing soulfully from the picture frame or in dramatic scenes painted in glowing colours. Far from passive mannequins, as members of an immensely creative social circle, these women actively helped form the Pre-Raphaelite movement as we know it. It is time to acknowledge their agency and explore their contributions.”
Lucy Dahlsen, Curator of Elizabeth Peyton said: “Over the last decade, Elizabeth Peyton has made a body of work that offers a highly sophisticated and personal exploration of portraiture. Her work, which is informed by an ever-expanding range of influences that cut across time and place, is born from an enduring desire to make pictures that tell us about love and human relationships.”
Pre-Raphaelite Sisters is curated by Dr Jan Marsh, who pioneered the study of Pre-Raphaelite women with collective and individual biographies, including Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, Jane and May Morris and Christina Rossetti: A Literary Life. She co-curated exhibitions about Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists, Marie Spartali and May Morris.
Elizabeth Peyton is curated by Lucy Dahlsen, Associate Curator, National Portrait Gallery. Lucy Dahlsen co-curated the exhibition Michael Jackson: On the Wall. She has curated displays of contemporary artists including Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Samuel Fosso, Luc Tuymans and Thomas Price. Previous exhibitions she has worked on include Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends and Giacometti: Pure Presence.
