Pre-Raphaelite Primitivism and the Periodical Press: Florence Claxton’s The Choice of Paris

A pastiche of Pre-Raphaelite art and aesthetic principles, Florence Claxton’s The Choice of Paris: An Idyll affirms the criticism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) voiced in Victorian England’s art-periodical press. Relying heavily on these periodical descriptions of Pre-Raphaelitism, the painting thus makes visible a textual discourse as much as a visual one. Central to this discourse is a culturally specific conception of artistic primitivism that appears in periodical reviews of Pre-Raphaelite art, one that conflates disparate notions of chronological and cultural primitivism in order to express in words an aesthetic idea conceived and executed in graphic form. Heavily dependent upon the textual – indeed, taking the shape it does because of the textual – Claxton’s Choice of Paris demonstrates, in this way, the complexly mediated means by which Pre-Raphaelitism circulated in print in mid-nineteenth-century Britain and beyond.