The Pre-Raphaelites and Science

The research for this Fellowship will form a major part of the first systematic study of the relationship between Pre-Raphaelite art in all its forms and science. The Pre-Raphaelites were the most original, experimental and influential of Victorian art movements, and they remain the most popular. The last year alone has seen major exhibitions of the Pre-Raphaelites and Italy, photography, drawing and design. It may seem counter-intuitive to link the Pre-Raphaelites, famous for their medievalism, to science, but they were the only Victorian artists to make this link repeatedly in their own manifestos, from essays in their early periodical 'The Germ' (1850) to Holman Hunt's retrospective account of the movement 'Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood' (1905). In such writings they argued that art should draw on and even emulate the sciences. Many critics have seen this as a marker of the Pre-Raphaelites' claim to being a modern art movement, but few have taken it seriously as a guide to how we might read their art itself.

I will be exploring in detail the different positions the Pre-Raphaelites took on the relationship between art and science, to see how far the claims they make for how art should respond to science are borne out in their painting, design, sculpture and poetry. During the Fellowship itself I will be working on four key topics.

Firstly, I will be working closely with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the Natural History Museum in South Kensington to see how the Pre-Raphaelites influenced the buildings in which the Victorians put their scientific view of the natural world on display. Through the patronage of John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites were directly involved in the design and decoration of the Oxford University Museum. I will be tracing this involvement in detail, to see how they helped to shape the building, both in practice and through their ideals. I will be looking too at how the Natural History Museum was shaped by Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics, particularly in the decorations that Richard Owen commissioned and Alfred Waterhouse designed for the inside and outside of the building. A close study of these two buildings will show how the spaces which we still use today to present our own scientific understanding of nature were shaped by Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic principles.

Secondly, I will be conducting an experiment in art criticism to see whether a fuller knowledge of what the Pre-Raphaelites said about science changes how we look at their paintings themselves. I'll be studying Pre-Raphaelite paintings and drawings in the major collections around the UK, including the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Walker Art Gallery and the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. I'll be working particularly closely with the Manchester Art Gallery and the Manchester Museum to devise ways of involving the general public and scientists themselves in this experiment, based on the existing models of their respective Pre-Raphaelite Experiment and Living Worlds exhibits.

Thirdly, I will be studying the papers of the Anthropological Society in the Royal Anthropological Institute to see how they bear on the poetry of A. C. Swinburne. Swinburne was a member of the Anthropological Society, at which scientific questions over evolution, race, sex, and the relationship of savagery to civilization were hotly debated between its foundation in 1863 and its merger with the Ethnological Society in 1871. This will be the first thorough study of how these debates are reflected in his poetry from the same period.

Fourthly, I will be reading systematically through the 'Fortnightly Review' from 1867 to 1873, to put the many Pre-Raphaelite poems published in this periodical in these years back into the context of its well-known commitment to positivism and scientific materialism.

In addition to benefiting the academic sector through its contribution to knowledge and understanding in several disciplines, including art history, museum studies, science studies, literature and aesthetics, my research will benefit museums themselves, schools and the general public. It will be valuable too to artists, writers, scientists and others keen to work with and foster the interaction between the arts and sciences in contemporary culture.

The impact of my research will be predominantly cultural. My work on and with the Oxford University Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Manchester Museum will attract visitors to these museums, help to capitalize on their archives and other collections, and provide them with educational and informational resources. It will provide these museums and others with suggestions for how they may be able to capitalize further on their buildings as cultural objects in themselves, and to explore the interrelation between the nature of their collections and the history and aesthetics of their premises. The general public will also be able to benefit from my research through talks, exhibitions and displays at the Oxford University Museum and the Natural History Museum.

One of the objectives of my research is to determine whether viewing Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the light of science affects what we see in them. While for my monograph I will be conducting a largely historicist study, examining the paintings in the light of Victorian science and its place in culture, in my collaborations with the Manchester Art Gallery and the Manchester Museum I will be looking into ways of inviting the wider public to think about the Pre-Raphaelites' paintings in terms of what they themselves saw to be their scientific approach to art. I will be encouraging both the public and scientists themselves to ask how their paintings might make us think about science and nature today, and vice versa. The outputs related to this aspect of the project will fall outside the time frame of the Fellowship, but they will result directly from the work done during the Fellowship and will again be of interest and cultural benefit to the general public, as well as attracting people to the participating galleries.

Finally, my research will contribute to the wider project of encouraging active engagement between the arts and the sciences, with benefits to practitioners in both spheres who are keen to foster and explore this relationship.