Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Fabrics of Enchantment’: Artist Travellers in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Europe
- 2 Opening Young Minds to Art and Knowledge: Art Training in Mid-Nineteenth-Century London and Paris
- 3 From ‘a Nibble’ to ‘Golden Guineas’: The British Art Market, 1850–61
- 4 Paint and Painting: The Virtues and Trials of Practices Exchanged by Word of Mouth
- 5 Joanna Mary Boyce: In Her Own Time
- 6 Joanna Mary Boyce: Beyond Pre-Raphaelitism
- 7 A Critical Career: Joanna Mary Boyce’s Art Writings
- 8 George Price Boyce: A Unique Vision
- 9 George Price Boyce: Art Collector
- 10 Henry Tanworth Wells: Miniaturist and Portrait Painter of Distinction
- General Bibliography
- Index
6 - Joanna Mary Boyce: Beyond Pre-Raphaelitism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 May 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Fabrics of Enchantment’: Artist Travellers in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Europe
- 2 Opening Young Minds to Art and Knowledge: Art Training in Mid-Nineteenth-Century London and Paris
- 3 From ‘a Nibble’ to ‘Golden Guineas’: The British Art Market, 1850–61
- 4 Paint and Painting: The Virtues and Trials of Practices Exchanged by Word of Mouth
- 5 Joanna Mary Boyce: In Her Own Time
- 6 Joanna Mary Boyce: Beyond Pre-Raphaelitism
- 7 A Critical Career: Joanna Mary Boyce’s Art Writings
- 8 George Price Boyce: A Unique Vision
- 9 George Price Boyce: Art Collector
- 10 Henry Tanworth Wells: Miniaturist and Portrait Painter of Distinction
- General Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The writings of Mr. Ruskin kindled her warmest sympathies, and did much in helping to form her taste, though in no slavish spirit. The example of such men as Millais, D.G. Rossetti and Holman Hunt, did more. From their works she derived invaluable stimulus, assimilating to herself much that is best in the spirit of them, borrowing nothing of the letter, as the common run of so-called young Pre-Raphaelites do.
SO WROTE JOANNA MARY Boyce's obituarist, Alexander Gilchrist. Boyce's artworks confirm that, in her attention to the ‘spirit’ as opposed to the ‘letter’ of early Pre-Raphaelite painting, she saw through the detail to the bigger picture. Indeed, her innate intellectual and creative independence made her more than a ‘young Pre-Raphaelite’. Pioneering scholarship by Pamela Gerrish Nunn successfully reinserted Boyce into art historical conscience in the 1980s and furthered her reputation in the 1990s by giving focus to her connections with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. My reassessment examines the breadth of Boyce's pursuit of her own individual style, which was not fully realised until shortly before her premature death. Indeed, by exploring diverse visual allusions to early Pre-Raphaelite paintings and intersections between Pre-Raphaelitism and emerging Aestheticism in her work, as well as her knowledge of traditional teachings of the British and French academies of art, contemporary French juste milieu style of painting, British and French social realism and historic Venetian painting, it is possible to appreciate her engagement with diverse sources within but also beyond Pre-Raphaelite painting.
Boyce's oeuvre is critical to our understanding of British art movements from the 1850s to early 1860s. In particular, her work reveals the genealogy of a shift towards Aesthetic art in a period when the intersection of separate categories in painting, Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism, became fraught. Indeed, Boyce became one of the earliest, and purest, Aesthetes. Her position in a varied milieu of artists – today associated with Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, academic art and social realism, for instance – can only be appreciated in the light of her immersion in the mid-nineteenth-century British art world as a social scene in which men, and women, networked and came to know one another's art work.
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- Victorian Artists and their World 1844-1861As reflected in the papers of Joanna and George Boyce and Henry Wells, pp. 191 - 238Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2024