Old and New Art (group of 3 poems)

The three sonnets were not made into an integral group until they were printed together in the 1881 Ballads and Sonnets, where they formed part of The House of Life (Sonnets LXXIV-LXXVI). Commenting on the their position in the 1881 House of Life, Baum observes that they “are rather out of place here, and are to be read as documents of the Pre-Raphaelite period” rather than integral units of The House of Life (see Baum, The House of Life, 307 ). But this is to read the sonnet sequence rather too narrowly, as if it only involved DGR's personal relationships in love. The sequence deals with the whole of DGR's “Life”, including the interconnections between all his evolving personal, artistic, and religious interests. In that frame of reference this group figures in a central way.

The sonnets comprise an explicit artistic manifesto. Their early date—all were originally written in the late 1840s— signals the continuity DGR wants to argue for his ideas and practices as they were being carried out in 1848, in 1870 and in 1881.

WMR has some good general remarks on the group (see his ( Memoir, I. 144 ).

WMR notes that the second and third sonnets were written in 1848 while the first came a bit later, in 1849 (WMR, Memoir, I. 144 ). Several manuscripts survive. The earliest (draft) copy of the first of the three sonnets is collected in a composite manuscript collection at the Huntington, which also collects an early copy of the third sonnet. Another composite manuscript collection at the Fitzwilliam has fair copies of the first, second and the third sonnets as well as corrected drafts of the first and the third. A third composite collection, at Yale, has late copies of the second and third sonnets, while a fourth composite collection, in the Library of Congress, has a late copy of the third sonnet.

All three sonnets were revised around 20 October 1880 when DGR was preparing them for their 1881 printing. The third sonnet underwent particularly extensive textual changes.

First published as a group of three in the 1881 Ballads and Sonnets and collected in that form thereafter.

“St. Luke the Painter”: The now lost drawing would be important to recover for elucidating DGR's programmatic ideas about art and its contemporary function. The subject drew DGR's interest because of St. Luke's legendary association with the art of painting, on one hand, and the mythology of the Virgin on the other—both essential Rossettian preoccupations.

The conceptual argument that the drawing involved can be recovered from the picture's textual equivalent. The sonnet is a virtual manifesto for the Pre-Raphaelite movement. As such, it occupies a crucial position in the 1870 Poems, where it appears among the Sonnets for Pictures. The exposition is elaborated when the sonnet is grouped with its two related sonnets under the heading Old and New Art in The House of Life of 1881.

The pivotal moment in the sonnet comes at lines 9-11, where DGR sets out his core critique of the humanistic revolution of the Renaissance. The force of this critique depends upon our realization that DGR's argument does not (and need not) proceed from a Christian ideology. The call for an art that would be at once secular, impersonal, and spiritual is central to all DGR's work, as it was to so much aesthetic and symbolist art (which DGR directly influenced) and of surrealist art (which he anticipated).

The programmatic character of the sonnet is even more clear in its original version, where the work is titled significantly“The Mission of Luke”. For DGR in 1849, the work of the Pre-Raphaelites was a mission of art to redeem it from its“soulless” worldliness.

An early manuscript of this sonnet, dating from about 1852, is housed in the Huntington Library. Three other integral manuscripts survive: a fair copy in the Library of Congress (with the other two sonnets in the group), and two copies in the Fitzwilliam composite “House of Life” sequence, a corrected copy and a fair copy.

Once the text is printed (in the 1869 Second Trial Book) it remains unchanged thereafter. The title in the 1870 Poems is “St. Luke the Painter (For a Drawing)”, whereas in 1881 it is headed “St. Luke the Painter”, and stands as the first of the three “Old and New Art” sonnets in The House of Life. In 1870 it is placed among the Sonnets for Pictures.

As the 1870 title of the poem indicates, it was written to accompany a drawing that DGR perhaps made around 1857 for Ruskin. Apparently when he originally wrote the sonnet in 1849 he planned to do a drawing, perhaps a painting, to accompany the sonnet, but he did not execute the work at that time (see see WMR, Preraphaelite Diaries and Letters 15 ).

As originally conceived, the work is closely related to DGR's early pictures and poems having to do with the Blessed Virgin or her Dantean equivalents. This relation is underscored by the sonnet's connection to Anna Jameson's Legends of the Madonna , a key early resource for DGR. Jameson:“St. Luke the Evangelist was early regarded as the great authority with respect to the few Scripture particulars relating to the character and life of Mary; so that, in the figurative sense, he may be said to have painted the portrait of her which has been since received as the perfect type of womanhood.” ( 47 ) Jameson then ( 47-48 ) enumerates out of texts from the Gospel According to St. Luke the various moral attributes of Mary; these correspond to what DGR sets forth in his pair of sonnets on “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin” and in the related pictures, as well as in “Ave”.

“Not as These”: The sonnet works through a generic allusion to Luke 18: 11 and the parable it locates,the story of the self-righteous Pharisee and the self-deprecating Publican. DGR works the biblical text into an allegory of the current condition of art and poetry in England and in Europe more generally. The sonnet argues that artists should not vaingloriously compare themselves to their less cultured contemporaries, but to “the lights of the great Past” (line 12), whose achievements will throw most proud currencies into shadow.

The earliest manuscript of this sonnet, dating from about 1848, is the copy at Yale, part of the Beinecke's Tinker Collection. Three other integral manuscripts survive: a fair copy in the Library of Congress (with the other two sonnets in the group); and a corrected copy in the Fitzwilliam composite “House of Life” sequence.

First printed as part of the three-sonnet unit in the 1881 Ballads and Sonnets, where it formed part of The House of Life (Sonnets LXXV).

“The Husbandmen”: This sonnet was originally written in 1848 and titled “To the Young Painters of England, (In Memory of Those Before Raffael)”. In that text it carried as a prefatory text an excerpt from the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew chapter 20) which underscored the programmatic contemporary message of the poem. The sonnet is a early manifesto for the aims of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—indeed, the earliest we have.

The poem is therefore quite an important work. Not least significant is its way of handling the biblical text, which DGR works so that it might yield a contemporary meaning for the practise of artists. All of DGR's early work that reaches for Christan, and especially Catholic and medieval, references, operates in the same way. It is deployed in the service of an artistic rather than a religious program, but an artistic program conceived in quasi-religious terms. Not without reason would F. W. H. Meyers title his famous early essay on DGR “The Religion of Beauty”.

The argument of the sonnet is bold, and in the light of the later history of modernist art movements, not a little prophetic. DGR is clearly imagining his work as part of a movement that takes its inspiration from before the coming of the Renaissance perspectivist revolution. He sees this return to primitive models as the first step in a major revolution in the practise of art. It is entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that he associated his own artistic program with the “Year of Revolutions”, 1848, when the European political scene was undergoing such an upheaval (with which he entirely sympathized).

An early manuscript of this sonnet, dating from before 1850, is at Yale, part of the Beinecke's Tinker Collection. Two other integral manuscripts survive: a fair copy in the Library of Congress (with the other two sonnets in the group); a corrected copy in the Fitzwilliam composite “House of Life” sequence. A pencil copy interlineated by WMR in a copy of Ballads and Sonnets, not forthcoming, is said to have variant readings in lines 2, 3, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13 and to represent, according to WMR's note in the book, “the first state of this sonnet, 1848”.

The Huntington Library manuscript, which dates from 1848, has one revision (to the final line) which appears to date from a later period—perhaps from 1880-1881, when DGR was preparing to include the sonnet as part of the “Old and New Art” sequence in The House of Life of 1881.

The sonnet bears a close relation to the series of cartoons DGR made in 1861 for Morris & Co. for the east window of St. Martin's Church, Scarborough. There were seven in all (see The Parable of the Vinyard sequence).

The date of the sonnet, 1848, associates its program for an artistic revolution with the “Year of Revolutions” at large. The poem should be read in relation to “At the Sun-Rise in 1848” and “On Refusal of Aid Between Nations”.