Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War, by Elizabeth Prettejohn, New Haven, CN and London: Yale University Press, 2017, pp. 288, £45, Hardback

Abstract

In 1895, the painter and critic (and cousin of the writer, Robert Louis Stevenson) R.A.M. Stevenson published a book in which he explored Velásquez as a truly modern artist. Stevenson interpreted Velásquez’s technique through the lens of Impressionism, and referenced his fin-desiècle contemporaries as Impressionist revivalists. In the midst of Elizabeth Prettejohn’s discussion of the significance of Spanish Old Masters for Frederic Leighton in both his Royal Academy lectures and many of his most substantial paintings, Stevenson’s views signal Prettejohn’s own focus on how time, memory, imitation, and influence are at work in British art history. She notes that for Stevenson, ‘Impressionism as an artistic movement is thus projected back to Velásquez as its initiator, and its modern manifestation becomes a “revival”, like the Pre-Raphaelite revival of early Renaissance painting, rather than a modernist break with the past’ (183). This insight invites new readings of late nineteenth-century historicism, fruitfully complicating narratives of modernism that characterize the art-historical scholarly landscape on both sides of the English Channel. By exploring questions of reference, allusion, and the deployment of the history of art as a flexible tool in the production of new paintings, it is not only possible but deeply right to probe what links might truly exist between Lawrence Alma-Tadema, John Singer Sargent, and Pablo Picasso. For artists, as well as for nineteenth-century curators, scholars, and collectors, it was essential and truly modern to establish meaningful relationships with Old Masters as no less than anachronic partners in innovative paintings that delivered truly new messages regarding subjects as diverse as love, God, literature, archaeology, and colour. Prettejohn’s Modern Painters, Old Masters contends that, from the midnineteenth century until well into the twentieth, British art’s relationships with Old Master European painting were a precious resource for the production of radically original work. From Ford Madox Brown to William Orpen, artists turned again and again to the glorious riches of the Italian Renaissance and to Spanish early modernism, many of which were readily accessible for lengthy and nuanced study in a growing array of regional public art galleries and national collections, as well as in prints and watercolour studies (230). Quoting David Hume’s Georgian rhetorical question, ‘Must we throw aside the pictures of our ancestors, because of their ruffs and farthingales?’ at the outset of her project, Prettejohn responds with a firm and appealing negative. For the artists