I listen to a lot of podcasts while I walk the streets of Hazelbrook. The content is fairly consistent though I eventually tire of too much of any one genre. Before the last US Presidential Election, I devoured copious quantities of political commentary. Following that extraordinary event, I needed a long break from that subject and dove back into The Great Courses Series. I have bought a dozen or so over the last couple of years and dip in when I can. Today I returned to a course on Victorian Britain.

Which brings me now to Charles Dickens and John Millais. Millais was a Pre-Raphaelite artist in the the mid-19th Century and on one occasion early in his career displayed a work entitled, Christ in the House of His Parents, at the Royal Academy in London. One might have thought that this is not a painterly subject likely to create a furor. It is worth noting that the Pre-Raphaelites wanted to return to a style of the Italian 14th Century, with historical subjects and an abiding faithfulness to nature being foremost. Paintings often contained abundant detail, intense colours and complex compositions. So what, you might ask? The Holy Family is the Holy Family!

This is not what Charles Dickens apparently saw when he attended the Royal Academy. Here is a portion of what he wrote about, Christ in the House of His Parents.

"You behold the interior of a carpenter’s shop. In the foreground of that carpenter’s shop is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed-gown, who appears to have received a poke in the hand, from the stick of another boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest ginshop in England."

Here is a reproduction of the painting.



A little harsh, you might say? Is Dickens looking at the same painting as we are? Or is he reacting to the ordinariness of this portrayal of Jesus and his parents, Joseph and Mary? Anyone who has seen works on the same subject from earlier periods will no doubt recognise the prosaic quality of the figures in this painting. No halos! No fabulous robes nor especially handsome faces! They could be anybody, really.

But not to worry. The famous art critic, John Ruskin, rode to the rescue and the Pre-Raphaelites, for all their pretentiousness, came into vogue in a big way.