DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61290#0027
ENGLISH ART IN 1850
3
a sanctified Rabelais run riot in all supernal things,
discerned weird glimpses of the coming light;
such glimpses as Chatterton, in the world of
poetry, caught brokenly before the neo-romantic
dawn.
Posterity may decide that the catastrophe thus
prophesied by Constable was only averted by the
grafting of an Italian genius upon English stock,
and that to the country of the Great Renaissance
England owes—at least in the field of painting-
her own Renaissance of the nineteenth century.
Spontaneous as was the impulse of revolt in
kindred minds, and worthily as it issued in the
hands of others, the supreme achievement of the
Pre-Raphaelite movement abides with Dante
Gabriel Rossetti. Without him there might have
been—and indeed was already begun—a breaking
up of the old pictorial conventions ; an experiment
both significant and fruitful in contemporary art.
Failing this ready soil, the genius brought over by
Rossetti from a Latin race could hardly hav£ been
naturalized as it was in early life by interchange of
thought and method with fellow-schismatics from
the English schools. But whether that vital change
of spirit which found its fullest expression in the
Pre-Raphaelite movement would have produced
anything like its present results independently of
Rossetti, is a question still entangled in that inju-
dicial partisanship of opinion from which no con-
3
a sanctified Rabelais run riot in all supernal things,
discerned weird glimpses of the coming light;
such glimpses as Chatterton, in the world of
poetry, caught brokenly before the neo-romantic
dawn.
Posterity may decide that the catastrophe thus
prophesied by Constable was only averted by the
grafting of an Italian genius upon English stock,
and that to the country of the Great Renaissance
England owes—at least in the field of painting-
her own Renaissance of the nineteenth century.
Spontaneous as was the impulse of revolt in
kindred minds, and worthily as it issued in the
hands of others, the supreme achievement of the
Pre-Raphaelite movement abides with Dante
Gabriel Rossetti. Without him there might have
been—and indeed was already begun—a breaking
up of the old pictorial conventions ; an experiment
both significant and fruitful in contemporary art.
Failing this ready soil, the genius brought over by
Rossetti from a Latin race could hardly hav£ been
naturalized as it was in early life by interchange of
thought and method with fellow-schismatics from
the English schools. But whether that vital change
of spirit which found its fullest expression in the
Pre-Raphaelite movement would have produced
anything like its present results independently of
Rossetti, is a question still entangled in that inju-
dicial partisanship of opinion from which no con-