The Semi-Nude and Collapsing Female Figure: Sexuality in the Aesthetic Paintings of Albert Moore and Edward Burne-Jones

The female nude has been researched extensively over the history of Art, and continues to fascinate researchers and art enthusiasts alike. However it is difficult to find information on female figures who are semi-nude: one who is not fully clothed nor entirely nude. The Victorian period in England was a very conservative time, especially for women. Influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetic painters Albert Moore and Edward Burne-Jones depicted women in a peculiarly sexual manner, one that encapsulates the struggle with sexual acceptance of the era. Women are often shown wearing loose, transparent fabric and often asleep or in languid, weary poses. These weary poses are what I refer to as “collapsing women.” In this visual analysis I take a close look at these female figures, and examine them using the terms “semi-nude” and “collapsing female,” in order to determine the meaning behind their dress and body language.

The Semi-Nude and Collapsing Female Figure: Sexuality in the Aesthetic Paintings of Albert Moore and Edward Burne-Jones

The female nude has been researched extensively over the history of Art, and continues to fascinate researchers and art enthusiasts alike. However it is difficult to find information on female figures who are semi-nude: one who is not fully clothed nor entirely nude. The Victorian period in England was a very conservative time, especially for women. Influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetic painters Albert Moore and Edward Burne-Jones depicted women in a peculiarly sexual manner, one that encapsulates the struggle with sexual acceptance of the era. Women are often shown wearing loose, transparent fabric and often asleep or in languid, weary poses. These weary poses are what I refer to as “collapsing women.” In this visual analysis I take a close look at these female figures, and examine them using the terms “semi-nude” and “collapsing female,” in order to determine the meaning behind their dress and body language.

Truth to Nature: Pre-Raphaelite Dress in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture

The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of artists in mid-nineteenth century England who disliked popular art, design, and fashion. They devised an oppositional, artistic type of dress. This major research project (MRP) endeavours to define, contextualize, and interpret the special kind of dress depicted in Pre-Raphaelite paintings and worn by women in the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Qualitative, interdisciplinary historical methods were used in my research method, and visual media (both primary and secondary sources) were used throughout the project. Outcomes include a new analysis of Pre-Raphaelite dress and its formal qualities along with a socio-cultural analysis of why the Pre-Raphaelites chose to dress in an eclectic way. The paintings reveal the diverse sources the Pre-Raphaelites used to create original garments in their illustrated works. The original garments the Pre-Raphaelites wore influenced other artistic, dress, and design reform movements such as the Aesthetic Dress movement and the Arts and Craft movement.

Truth to Nature: Pre-Raphaelite Dress in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture

The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of artists in mid-nineteenth century England who disliked popular art, design, and fashion. They devised an oppositional, artistic type of dress. This major research project (MRP) endeavours to define, contextualize, and interpret the special kind of dress depicted in Pre-Raphaelite paintings and worn by women in the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Qualitative, interdisciplinary historical methods were used in my research method, and visual media (both primary and secondary sources) were used throughout the project. Outcomes include a new analysis of Pre-Raphaelite dress and its formal qualities along with a socio-cultural analysis of why the Pre-Raphaelites chose to dress in an eclectic way. The paintings reveal the diverse sources the Pre-Raphaelites used to create original garments in their illustrated works. The original garments the Pre-Raphaelites wore influenced other artistic, dress, and design reform movements such as the Aesthetic Dress movement and the Arts and Craft movement.

Marie Spartali-Stillman’s feminism against Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood gender stereotypes art

In the middle of the 19th century Great Britain, Queen Victoria had been imposing her new ethical code system on social and cultural conditions, sharpening evidently the already abyssal differences of the gendered stereotypes. The Pre-Raphaelite painters reacted to the sterile way of painting dictated by the art academies, both in terms of thematology and technique, by suggesting a new, revolutionary way of painting, but were unable to escape their monolithic gender stereotypes culture. Using female models for their heroines who were often identified with the degraded position of the Victorian woman, they could not overcome their socially systemic views, despite their innovative art ideas and achievements. However, art, in several forms, executed mainly by women, played a particularly important role in projecting several types of feminism, in a desperate attempt to help the Victorian woman claim her rights both in domestic and public sphere. This article aims at exploring and commenting on the role of Marie Spartali-Stillman, one of the most charismatic Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood models and later famous painter herself, in the painting scene of the time. Through the research of her personal and professional relationship with the Pre-Raphaelites, and mainly through an in depth analysis of selected paintings, the authors try to shed light on the way in which M. Spartali-Stillman managed to introduce her subversive feminist views through her work, following in a way the feministic path of other female artists of her time. The ways and the conditions, under which the painter managed to project women as dominant, self-sufficient and empowered, opposing their predetermined social roles, have also been revised.

The Pre-Raphaelites and their Keatsian Romanticism: An Analysis of the Renderings of 'The Eve of St Agnes and Isabella'

This research examines the influence of Romantic poet John Keats on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a Victorian artistic and literary movement. The aim of this paper is to prove how Keats became, moreover, a major connecting link between Romanticism and the Victorian era, thus enabling the continued existence of certain Romantic aesthetic features until the beginning of the twentieth century. In that sense, we will explore how this influence took shape and we will analyse Pre-Raphaelite works of art which have as source of inspiration some of Keats’s well-known poems (“Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil” and “The Eve of St. Agnes”). This examination will allow us to perceive the manner in which these artists devised their pictorial style based on Keatsian pictorialism in poetry, with a special emphasis on the significance of medievalism, and the beauty and sensuousness of his verses, and how they were transferred into their canvases.

The Pre-Raphaelites

Across media including painting, stained glass, architecture, photography, and furniture, the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle explored medievalism’s inheritances and produced new and radical responses to the Middle Ages in bold new visual culture within Britain and its empire. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur provided stimulating springboards for emerging ideas regarding the arts in relation to narrative, memory, religion, and romance. Tropes of love, heroism, and beauty were by turns subverted and lauded in diverse Pre-Raphaelite efforts to contend with the Middle Ages and to graft their own values within its spirit. Focusing on what made the Pre-Raphaelite vision innovative, and considering the differing registers of engagement with the Middle Ages through encounter with contemporary and medieval literature across the arts, this chapter considers the unique contribution of artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron, Ford Madox Brown, John Everett Millais, and Edward Burne-Jones to the spirit of medievalism that gripped the modern Victorian imagination