The superb to the silly of Victorian painting

By T.J. McNAMARA

They are not all to be tarred with the same brush. There is a tendency to speak of Victorian painting as if it were a unified whole, but there was a great variety of subject matter, if little variation in style.

One of the great merits of Love & Death at the Auckland Art Gallery is that it gives a fair guide to the multiplicity of themes 19th-century painters worked on. It also shows the variety of talent. The paintings range from the superb to the silly.

Uniformity of style comes from the way most of these artists were academic painters. They were taught to draw in the academic schools and were the inheritors of a long tradition of accepted painterly solutions to problems of modelling, perspective, anatomy and characterisation.

Another value of the exhibition is that it enables us to see the British version of the Salon Art Impressionists such as Monet were reacting against. The Impressionists were greeted with howls of execration because there was no story in their work. "Where's the story?" cried the critics.

Academic painting was all about telling stories from legend and literature. All the paintings in this show are narrative paintings. Now, the painters would probably be film directors.

Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind by John Millais, which is tucked away at the back of the Wellesley wing and is one of the excellent contributions from our Auckland collection, is a wonderfully painted study of cold winter weather. Monet would have envied such landscape painting but because it is by a prominent Royal Academician it, typically, has to have a story: a woman with a baby in the foreground, a man marching off into the distance and, in the centre, a dog howling its divided loyalty.

The painting is also impressive because it is one of the few that portrays the contemporary scene. Most of the painters were lost in dreams of the Middle Ages or Antiquity.

Successful painters had enormous social status but some were out and some were in. This exhibition offers some grand paintings by Frederic Leighton, the only artist to be made a lord because of his contribution to art and the Royal Academy. He was a handsome man and a social lion. His opulent house in Kensington, now a tourist attraction, is evidence of his wealth and standing.

His enormous talent was devoted to pictures of classical antiquity: beautifully finished, polished pictures of English women dressed as ancient Greeks. Leighton's specialty was big paintings of a frieze of figures in procession.

There is a spectacular example splendidly hung on the end wall of the main gallery. It is called The Syracusan bride leading wild beasts in procession to the Temple of Diana. It is a little hard to identify which is the bride, but the lions, the tigers and a leopard are wonderfully handled, and the colour is stunning.

Leighton was in but Dante Gabriel Rossetti was on the outer. He and his pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were in revolt against academic derivatives of Raphael such as, in this show, Frederick Goodall's The Holy Mother - all Renaissance except for the sexy flank in the gap of her robe.

Rossetti was the antithesis of Leighton. He succumbed to drink, drugs and guilt at the age of 54. He was as great a poet as he was a painter, and was racked by his passion for women. He created the fashion for a certain style of beauty: women with a long neck, a long jaw and fleshy, pouting lips. It was to remain the European ideal until World War I.

The guilt came from his association with two women who exemplified this style of beauty. One was Elizabeth Siddal, his wife, who died of an overdose of opium. Rossetti buried the only manuscript of his poems with her but later had her exhumed to recover them. That made him guilty.

The guilt was compounded when he found another example of his ideal beauty, a "stunner" named Jane Burden. She married his follower, William Morris. Rossetti was obsessed by her, probably had an affair with her, and painted her again and again. She is in this show, not in a painting but in a fiery red pastel as Pandora caressing the casket she will open to let loose the evils of the world. Her eyes are hypnotic.

Rossetti's most immediate follower, well represented in this exhibition, was Edward Burne-Jones. He, too, found a Rossetti-esque model in a Greek sculptress called Maria Zambaco. Her face appears on all the figures in his painting, men or women. They also share her trim behind.

Burne-Jones, the soul of respectability, made a suicide pact with her and they jumped together into the Serpentine but the water was too cold and they climbed out again. Burne-Jones went home and his wife forgave him but Maria's image lingered on in such splendidly decorative canvases as Perseus Freeing Andromeda and St George Slaying the Dragon, both sweet and notable for singularly harmless monsters.

These are the great figures and the show is filled out, perhaps too much, by grand painters of the second rank, some very good third-rank painters and some also-rans.

Some to look out for: Lady Butler, who painted tremendous battle pictures, is represented by a work that shows how infantry in square with bayonets could repel cavalry. It shows explicitly how the battles of Quatre Bras and Waterloo were won by the Duke of Wellington. Lawrence Alma-Tadema's dark-eyed Cleopatra in a leopard skin is enclosed in a frame like an Egyptian temple designed expressly for the picture. This painting also belongs to Auckland.

Great collections of English Victorian painting stretch from London to Birmingham to Liverpool and to Sydney, Adelaide and Auckland. This is a worthy sample of those in the Antipodes.