The Clockmaker's Daughter

The Magenta Brotherhood described in the novel is loosely patterned on a Victorian group of artists who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The three members who originated the idea in 1848—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt—expanded the original group to seven. Later artists associated with the group included Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and John Waterhouse.

The aesthetic of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood drew on 18^th- and 19^th-century Romanticism, which emphasized feeling and expression in literature and art. The Pre-Raphaelites agreed that the aesthetic upheld by the Royal Academy of Arts in their time was unimaginative and uninspired—too mannered and methodical. They claimed that this trend had begun with 16th-century artists like Michelangelo and Raphael, and the group wanted to return to styles that had predominated in 15th-century Italian art before Raphael. The Pre-Raphaelites declared an interest in the medieval, mystical, and romantic, and their aesthetic demanded fine detail, vibrant color, and layered compositions that produced what they felt was a more natural style. The character of Pippa in the novel describes the Pre-Raphaelites as “obsessed over things like nature and truth; color, composition, and the meaning of beauty,” with an eye for realism and detail (43).

Their paintings were intended to stir feeling, and many of them celebrated female beauty and sensuality. Iconic works of the Pre-Raphaelites include Millais’s Ophelia (1851-52), showing the Shakespearean heroine drowning. This portrait nearly cost the life of his model, Elizabeth Siddal, when she sat too long in the bath. William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853) depicts a woman rising from her lover’s lap, apparently in the grip of a religious epiphany, while the background is rife with tiny symbolic details. Dante Gabriel Rossetti depicted many of his female subjects with intensely red hair, like his Lady Lilith (1866-68). The red hair that author Kate Morton gives to Birdie alludes to Rossetti’s favorite models. Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) was inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites in the subject and arrangement of her photographic portraits, and Pippa alludes to her style when Elodie shows her the photograph of Lily Millington.

The chief philosophical tenets of the Pre-Raphaelites were “art for art’s sake,” eschewing the contemporary notion that art should have a political or moral valence, and “truth to nature,” underlining their preference for realism (Roe, Dinah. “Naturally Artificial: The Pre-Raphaelite Garden Enclosed.” Victorian Poetry, 2019). Their approach caused arguments among critics. Charles Dickens notoriously disliked the Pre-Raphaelites (in The Clockmaker’s Daughter he is against the Magenta Brotherhood as well, which makes Lucy feel guilty for liking his novels). John Ruskin, the most important and celebrated art critic of the period, supported the Pre-Raphaelites, and Morton makes him a supporter of the Magenta Brotherhood; Ruskin organizes a Royal Academy exhibition for their works. While the Brotherhood only lasted a few years, breaking apart due to internal disagreements and rivalries, their influence on European art lasted much longer. They inspired later artistic movements like Decadence and Symbolism, as well as developments in the decorative arts, particularly the style known as Art Nouveau. Their influence extended into literature, too, most famously in the poetry of Dante’s sister, Christina Rossetti.

The Pre-Raphaelites held unconventional attitudes about fashion and sexual mores, expressed in both their paintings and their personal lives. They depicted the women in flowing dresses with flowers in their hair, a mode of dress that their wives and models also preferred. Rossetti also, notoriously, had affairs with his models. Morton gives her Magenta Brotherhood a similar ease of style, noting that Edward and Thurston attracted a lot of attention with “the way they dressed, their loose shirts and scarfs, their wild hair and free attitudes” (247). With the publication of his novel Vanity Fair in 1848, William Makepeace Thackeray introduced the term “bohemian” into English usage to apply to artists who stood outside conventional society and were untroubled by disapproval (Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. Oxford University Press, 2015). In the United States in the 1860s, the term was applied to newspapermen who traveled to find stories, while in England it more generally signified a lifestyle of careless appearance and expansive sexual habits.