Oxford Sees Red

Brilliant in colour and bold in form, William Butterfield’s buildings for Keble College, designed in 1867, exemplify the avant-garde principles of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, as Michael Hall explains

- Michael Hall

IN 2012, Tate Britain staged an exhibition on the Pre-Raphaelites that attempted to tear down barriers. As Tim Barringer and Jason Rosenfeld wrote in the catalogue, it sought to ‘present the art of the Pre-Raphaelites as an avant-garde movement whose achievements across many media—painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and the applied arts, as well as literature and political theory—constitute a major contribution to the history of modern art’. Yet architecture was ignored. Its total absence from the show was startling, as, in the 1850s, the radical young architects who wanted to develop Gothic into a modern style declared that they, too, were Pre-Raphaelites.

The clearest statement of this was made by the architect George Edmund Street in an article, On the Future of Art in England, which was published in 1858. He argued that ‘the Pre-Raphaelite movement is identical with our own… The systems and rules against which architects and painters had to contend were identical. Alike we had to contend against an established system, of false laws and idle traditions, with all the prestige of an Academy to back it, and all the power in the hands of its professors. Alike we had to recur to first principles—to maintain first of all the necessity in all matters of art of absolute unwavering truth’.