The Life and Work of John Brett

John Brett (1831-1902) was seen in the early 1860s as the head of the Pre-Raphaelite landscape school. His most famous work, the 'Val d'Aosta' (1858-9) was the subject of a long critical appreciation by John Ruskin, who later bought the painting. During the 1860s he began to specialize in coastal and marine painting, and built up a very successful career, which enabled him to support a large family in the 1870s and 1880s. Brett's paintings, watercolours and drawings are eagerly sought after by collectors and have been the subject of many scholarly articles. Important works by him have come to light in recent years, including major oil paintings. With the recent and forthcoming exhibitions devoted to John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, there is a growing acknowledgement that the major figures in the Pre-Raphaelite movement deserve to be looked at in a comprehensive fashion, rather than concentrating narrowly on their work in the middle years of the nineteenth century.

Brett is discussed in almost every book on the Pre-Raphaelites. In addition to the 'Val d'Aosta', his early paintings, the 'Glacier of Rosenlaui' (1856) and the 'Stonebreaker' (1857-8) are regarded as key works in the history of the movement. His works were prominent in three recent exhibitions at Cardiff (2001), Tate Britain (2004) and Penzance (2006). There is no published monograph on his life and work as a whole, and my research aims to fill that gap. In addition to the monograph (which is already partially completed), I will catalogue an exhibition of his portraits and figure drawings, to be shown at the Barber Institute, Birmingham and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, in 2010.

In the census of 1871, Brett gave his occupation as 'student of natural philosophy'. He had a lifelong interest in geology, astronomy and meteorology, and my study of his work will involve the wider question of the place of science in the development of landscape painting. In addition, my book on Brett will be the first text to give full attention to his religious beliefs and their effect on his paintings. In the 1850s he was a keen member of the Congregationalist church, and an admirer of Thomas Toke Lynch, whose poetry, with its pantheistic and symbolic approach to the natural world, was an important source for Brett's landscapes between 1856 and 1860. He moved in the course of the 1860s to an agnostic viewpoint, similar to that of Herbert Spencer, which continued to incorporate his youthful sense of wonder at the beauty of the world. In concentrating on the sea and the coast in his later work, he was choosing subject matter which had profound religious significance, as I demonstrated in my book 'Where the Sea meets the Land: Artists on the Coast in Nineteenth-century Britain' (2007).

I will use the extensive surviving sketchbooks, journals, family letters, photographs, log books and writings by Brett (many of which are in private collections) to reconstruct the course of Brett's career, and to assess the significance of his work in the context of British landscape painting. I also intend to apply modern environmental theory to Brett's particular style, with its sharply-focused distances and increasingly empty foregrounds. In 'The Experience of Landscape' (1975, revised 1996) Jay Appleton argues that landscape painting, with its emphasis on protective foregrounds and expansive distances (prospect and refuge) can be related to man's evolutionary history as a hunter. Brett's family naval background and his interest in telescopes predisposed him to concentrate on prospect rather than refuge. However, this emphasis was not always appreciated by critics, and environmental theory will also be used to draw general conclusions about the nature and reception of Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting.