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John Everett Millais' “Secret-Looking Garden Wall” and the Courtship Barrier in Victorian Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Susan P. Casteras
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Extract

The Victorians Were obsessed with themes of love and courtship, which dominated the walls of the Royal Academy in increasing numbers from the middle of the century to its end. While in the early 1800s a canvas with such a subject was often entitled something like The Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne, Cupid and Psyche, or Scipio Restoring the Captive Princess to her Lover, by the 1840s the pictorial interest had shifted to essentially bourgeois portrayals. With each year thetally of courtship themes escalated, vignettes of lovelorn maidens appearing on exhibition walls alongside canvases with ludicrous titles and themes like The Leper's Bride. Within this wide scope of amorousness, however, love was firmly fixed in the Victorian consciousness as transpiring in the sovereign domain of the earthly paradise, and more precisely, in the middle-class garden or its perimeters in nature.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 13 , Spring 1985 , pp. 71 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

Notes

1. On this interconnection and on caged birds as symbols of innocence, see Lorenz Eitner, “Cages, Prisons and Captives in Eighteenth-Century Art,” Images of Romanticism: Verbal and Visual Affinities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 15–19, and also E. de Jongh, “Erotica in Vogelperspectief: De dubbelzinningheid van een reeks 17de eeuwse genrevorstelligen,” Simiolus, 3 (1968–1969), 73–74.Google Scholar

2. The symbolic significance of the hortus condusus in the modernized context of the Anglican nunnery is explored in Casteras, Susan P., “Virgin Vows: The Early Victorian Artists' Portrayal of Nuns and Novices,” Victorian Studies, 24 (Winter 1981), 157–84. On the stylistic affinities of Convent Thoughts with other Pre-Raphaelite compositions, see Allen Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). PP. 46–47.Google Scholar

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4. See, for example, on the herita of the hortus condusus to Victorian iconology, Casteras, Susan P., “Down the Garden Path: Courtship Culture and its Imagery in Victorian Painting,” doctoral dissertation (Yale University, 1977), pp. 67–82.Google Scholar

5. On the oil painting, last known in the Huntington Hartford collection, see Bennett, Mary, PRB Millais PRA (Walker Art Gallery Exhibition Catalogue, 1967), pp. 33–34. The intertwining themes of religion versus duty may owe a debt to Holman Hunt, whose 1850 Claudio and Isabella (Tate Gallery) also incorporated this idea. When The Huguenot was exhibited in 1852, Frederick Shields, a friend of Millais, wrote that “…crowds stood before it all day long. Men lingered there for hours, and went away but to return. It had clothed the old feelings of men in a new garment, and its pathos found almost universal acceptance. This was the picture which brought Millais to the height of his reputation.” As quoted in John Guille Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (London: Methuen, 1899), I, 146.Google Scholar

6. As reported in Millais, I, 136.Google Scholar

7. As quoted in Millais, I, 135.Google Scholar

8. As quoted in Millais, I, 136.Google Scholar

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14. [Anonymous], Review of the Royal Academy Exhibition, The Art-Union, 10 (1848), 370.Google Scholar

15. As found in the unpublished notebook of Philip Hermogenes Calderon, unnumbered pages. I am grateful to Jeremy Maas for allowing me access to this document.Google Scholar

16. The fair-haired versus the darkhaired rival was also a staple in Victorian novels, and a brief discussion of this idea in art is found in Casteras, Susan P., The Substance or the Shadow: Images of Victorian Womanhood (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1982), p. 14.Google Scholar

17. As cited in Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), A Catalogue Raisonné (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971). Vol. 1, 55.Google Scholar

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21. Wilson, , p. 38.Google Scholar

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24. Count D'Orsay, Alfred [Alfred Orsay], The Etiquette and Usages of Society (New York: Wilson & Company [first published in London]: 1843), p. 1.Google Scholar

25. Anonymous: The Etiquette of Courtship and Marriage (London: David Bogue, 1844), pp. 40–41.Google Scholar

26. The Etiquette of Courtship and Marriage, pp. 28–31.Google Scholar

27. Fowler, O.S., Creative and Sexual Science: Or Manhood, Womanhood, and Their Mutual Inter-Relations (New York and London: Fowler & Wells, 1875), p. 484Google Scholar

28. Hon. Rowley, Hugh, Gamosgammon, or, Hints on Hymen (London: J.C. Hotten, 1871), p. 88.Google Scholar

29. For fuller discussion of this theme and many more pictorial examples, see Casteras, Susan P., Down the Garden Path: Courtship Culture and Its Imagery in Victorian Painting (Ph.D. Dissertation,Yale University, 1977), pp. 356–471.Google Scholar