The Musée d’Orsay is presenting “A Ballad of Love and Death”: pre-Raphaelite Photography in Great Britain, 1848 – 1875, from March 8 to May 27. The exhibition, organized by Diane Waggoner, curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and Françoise Heilbrun, head curator at the Orsay Museum, explores the tight relations between the pre-Raphaelite painting movement that began in 1848 and Victorian photography beween 1850 et 1860.

John Ruskin, an influential historian and art critic defended “pre-Raphaelite brotherhood” young painters John Everett, Millais Dante, Gabriel Rossetti et William Hunt who deplored
the “decadence that British painting had fallen into since Turner’s old age”. A “brotherhood” that rebelled against academics and pushed for a new language using “bright colors and precise details”. In the beginning, Ruskin was impressed by the dageuerreotype’s precision, allowing the eye to discover infinite and neglected details. But he was critical of landscape photography, “incapable of reproducing natural colors, especially from the sky”. But photographers like Roger Fenton, Henry White… were already experimenting with the new wet collodion technique, even if it wasn’t quit as precise but was quicker and more transparent, non negligeable for portrait work. All of the prints exposed in this exhibit are a result of this process. As for the exhibition itself, it starts with the “Ruskin Eye” and finishes with “modern life” with a sort of end to “brotherhood”, each following his own destiny both in their lives as in their aesthetics, leaning towards more colorful and sensual art.

Bernard Perrine
Correspondant de l’Institut de France
Bernard.Perrine1@orange.fr

“A Ballad of Love and Death”: pre-Raphaelite Photography in Great Britain, 1848 – 1875
Until May 29
Musée d’Orsay
1 rue de la Légion d’Honneur
75007 Paris