INTRODUCTION n August 1848 the young Academy rebel, William Holman Hunt set up his canvas in a garden in South London. He paints a fig tree, 'its leaves and branches in full sunlight, with what was then unprecedented exactness'; next, 'a patch of grass with dandelion puffs and blossoms'. Hovering nearby is a bee 'with gold and dun banded body' which he microscopically transcribes, together with pebbles 'all diverse in tints and shapes' which will serve as his foreground, in place of the customary 'meaningless spread of whitey brown'. For his background he travels across London, to Hampstead, and paints 'a row of young saplings... spangled with blossoms and flowers run to seed'; last of all, beyond the horizon, 'the top of a foliated tree'. The facts of perception tell us that such a mosiac of separately garnered ocular impressions is not how the eye actually sees. At no one moment would Hunt's brain have registered any other image than that of a small, sharply-focused nimbus - the bee, some pebbles, a sapling - shading to a blur, and thence to blackness at the ill-defined edges of vision. John Ruskin claimed that Hunt and his other Pre- Raphaelite protegés had achieved an 'absolute, uncompromising truth' of representation. It was a misleading assertion, and one that his literal-minded contemporaries reacted to with understandable scepticism. It was not the truth, but it was a new vision. In the typical painting of the 1850's by Hunt, Millais, or their followers like C. A. Collins, Arthur Hughes, or John Inchbold, the mass of luminous details accumulates on the picture-plane like the contents of a huge casket of jewels strewn across a table-top. As with the early Italian masters whom they venerated (but to whom in other respects they owed little) landscape 'stands up' like a stage backdrop. There is no atmosphere, frequently no sky. In an access of insane radicalism (which contrasts so oddly with their conservative moral orientation) the Pre-Raphaelites abandoned the system, built up over centuries, of representing solid objects in atmospheric space. The effect was not real but hyper-real. Like the clutter of a Victorian domestic interior, or Ruskin's collection of geo- logical specimens, or an image-cluster of Robert Browning's, a Pre-Raphaelite work is an attempt to master reality: to come to terms with a world every day revealed as more complex and baffling, by gathering together as many small parts of it as possible. It was the product of neurosis; but it was fresh, energetic, and palpable. 'The old world was well-nigh exhausted,' wrote a painter in 1857, 'with its wearisome mothers and children called Madonnas... Here was a world fainting and exhausted... Then all at once breaks a small light in the far West, and a new world slowly widens to our sight - new sky, new earth, new flowers, a very heaven compared with the old earth...' With the Pre- Raphaelites in mind, we might be forgiven for supposing that Joseph Durham ARA is here referring to the brave dawn of 1848. In fact, of course, it is the invention of photography which he salutes. So inured arc we to photographic images, and so dim with age arc many mid- nineteenth century photographs, that it is hard for us to realise how bright, how clear, how new, the products of the invention appeared to contemporaries-how like, in fact. Pre- Raphaelite paintings still appear to us. Ruskin described the first daguerreotypes he bought in Venice as 'little gems'. It was 'as if a magician had reduced the reality (of San Marco or the Grand Canal) to be carried away into an enchanted land'. The element of colour was missing, but photography made up for it by a miraculous double measure of that other Pre-Raphaelite attribute: precision. As one photographer, typically anxious to promote his art as a rival to painting, wrote: 'the most painstaking Pre-Raphaelite may emulate in vain its wondrous precision'. This proudly proclaimed virtue was, as it happens, greatly enhanced by two technical innovations which occurred within three years of the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: the introduction of the extremely sensitive albumen paper for printing; and, more significant, Frederick Scott Archer's 'wet collodion' or 'wet plate' process. This employed glass instead of the old paper negatives of Fox Talbot's 'calotype'. The early masterpieces of calotype photography, particularly those of Fox Talbot's Scottish counterparts, D.O. Hill and R. Adamson, had gained their power not from detail but, on the contrary, from chiaroscuro effects. When the writer on art. Lady Eastlake, describes the effect of the arrival of the wet plate, we wonder, as we do with Joseph Durham, whether it is photography or Pre-Raphaelitism she is writing about. 'The small, broadly-treated, Rembrandt-like studies... arc replaced by portraits of the most elaborate detail... The little bit of little landscape effect, all blurred and uncertain in forms, and those lost in a confused and discoloured ground, which was nothing and might be anything, is suspersedcd by large pictures with minute foregrounds, regular planes of distance, and perfectly clear skies.' But were technical innovations really enough to bring about anything other than the most superficial resemblances between photography and painting in this period? The answer is that they were - when aided by those spiritual con- cerns which consciously or otherwise bind those of a single generation; and by the obsessive, albeit covert, mutual fascination existing between the two arts. The bond between Pre- Raphaclites and photographers is profound. It goes deeper than the documented use of photographs by Rossetti, Madox Brown and Millais, or the conscious adoption of Pre-Raphaelite themes by High Art photographers like Henry Peach Robinson. Consider, for example, approaches to landscape. The wet plate process was extremely laborious. The equipment had to be carried around in a large trunk or van. The mere effort of unpacking everything induced a scrupulous- ness in the choice of subject matched only by that of Holman Hunt in setting up his easel. Before Hunt set to work to transcribe every leaf on the tree in front of him, he had to be certain it was the right tree. It was the same with a master of collodion photography like Roger Fenton. Ponton trundled his cartload of equipment the length of the land in the 1850's, but rarely unloaded it before a scene which was in any way insignificant or uninspiring. Pre-Raphaelitism and wet plate photography both appeared to promise in the first instance a broadening in the range of subject-matter: Pre-Raphaelitism, because this was an important way to establish independence from moribund academic traditions; photography, because non-static subjects were now possible with the short exposure permitted by the new process. In spite of this, the two converged on a remarkably narrow - and a remarkably similar - range of visual themes. Technically at this stage, the photographers could not record clouds without losing the landscape beneath. The painters, for their part, had seen too much grandiose, billowing cumulus in the works of their predecessors. Both therefore pitched their horizon high, and chose lofty vantage points to avoid an effect of vertigo. To emphasize technical prowess and to celebrate the tangibility and presence of landscape, mists and other Romantic impedimenta were banished. The completed photograph or paint- ing stands, not so much a 'window on the world', but nature, and the facts of vision, trans- muted: Walter Pater's 'Eastern carpet... refined upon, and dealt with more subtly and exquisit- ely than by nature itself. As if in harness. Pre-Raphaelites and photographers go in search of those natural artefacts which most effectively display their abilities as conjurors of the intricate and the densely patterned: the wheatfield, the ivy-covered wall, the granite escarpment, the pebbled beach. Often, like Holman Hunt and Francis Frith, viewing the same close-knit patterns of sunbaked rock and pathways from a hillside in Palestine within a year or two of each other, they find themselves drawn to an identical geographical location. The climax is reached of that movement which had begun in a very private way many decades before: when William Blake had scribbled in the margin of his copy of Reynolds's 'Discourses', 'To Generalise is to be an Ideot. To particularise is the Alone Distinction of Merit'. Pre-Raphaclitism has of course never been satisfactorily defined. Indeed, it is not possible to corral within a single definition a movement brought about by an essentially accidental alliance between two such disparate personalities as Holman Hunt and D. G. Rossetti. The best attempts acknowledge at least two Pre- Raphaelitisms, corresponding to the increasingly divergent aims of these two, the strongest personalities involved. Ruskin referred to a 'prosaic' and a 'poetic' Pre-Raphaclitism. This may not be entirely satisfactory. But it is true that the original dual aims of l848 - 'prosaic' truth to nature, and 'poetic' themes - had undergone an odd transformation by the end of the 1850's. No longer for the most part, the dual purpose of single individuals, they had become the separate obsessions of two distinct groups. There were the devotees of 'fact' like Inchbold and John Brett on the one hand; on the other, Dante Gabriel himself, resisting all Ruskin's blandishments to go to Wales and 'make me a sketch of some rocks in the bed of a stream' - withdrawing instead into a private dreamworld, while a swelling band of mesmerized admirers looked on. I have referred to the shared vision of Pre-Raphaelites and wet collodion photographers in the bright dawn of their respective arts. Pre-Raphaelitism as it was later shaped by the influence of Rossetti had yet clearer equivalents in photography. 'Under the arch of life, where love and death Terror and mystery, guard her shrine, I saw Beauty enthroned...' writes Rossetti, apostrophizing Beauty, the muse which inspired him from his art's early resplendence through all the years of decline. 'Oh mystery of Beauty! who can tell Thy mighty influence?...' Less of a poet than Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron was no less devoted to the muse, and, in her chosen field, as much of an artist as Dante Gabriel. In her work, the mundane and the plain, the spots and blemishes of real life, arc banished. The Beautiful is captured and confined. 'I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me...' and when given a camera as a cure for depression, this is precisely what the spirited woman succeeded in doing. But was the camera - the passive servant of reality - the appropriate vehicle for this careful selection process? Here also Mrs. Cameron followed the lead given by Rossetti. Dante Gabriel lacked the gifts and the temperament to become the slave of 'nature' which early Pre- Raphaelite dogma had seemed to demand. He also divined that if the play of light on St. George's armour, or the hairs on Beatrice's head were minutely delineated in the Holman Hunt manner, the particular mood which interested him - whose essence was vagueness and intangibility - would vanish. After his early oil paintings, 'The Girlhood of Mary Virgin' and 'Eccc Ancilla Domini', he softened his outlines and aimed at breadth and tonal consistency. Mrs. Cameron's predecessors in photography formed two groups. First, professionals like H. P. Robinson and Oscar Rejlander who anticipated fashionable success with Pre-Raphaelite themes - 'mediaeval', Tennysonian - and 'drooping', 'soulful' women. Secondly, amateurs like Lady Hawarden and Lewis Carroll, whose portraiture was Pre-Raphaelite at least in the sense that it effectively evoked the reveries of the sitters. (Nor should it be forgotten that Rejlandcr, Carroll and Mrs. Cameron herself were linked with the Pre-Raphaelites in a network of social relationships, and of shared ideas.) But most of Mrs. Cameron's predecessors had employed sharp focus - just as Rossetti's colleagues had painted with sharp outlines. Mrs. Cameron abandoned this. What had been regarded as the glory of Scott Archer's invention was laid aside in favour of vague outlines and broad tonal masses. In her best imaginative work (always distinct from her justly celebrated portraiture) the aim, as in Rossetti's watercolour masterpieces of the 1850's, is brilliantly consonant with the means: a breathtakingly seductive vision to those not irreversibly disdainful of the forms in which mid-Victorian fantasy clothed itself Mrs. Cameron prevails upon her gardener and her parlourmaid to get themselves up as chivalric suitor and doomed damosel. She sits them uncomfortably on a bench in her greenhouse; implores them to overcome embarrassment and adopt expressions redolent of passion and nameless sorrow. Grimly they hold the pose for the required forty seconds - occasionally, of course, the result is a fiasco, but at other times, Mrs. Cameron succeeds against the odds; the movement which began with the fervent aspirations of l848 moves into a new phase. Michael Bartram