Looking at Pre-Raphaelite paintings, it can be difficult to see beyond the beautiful surface to a more grisly sublayer. This 19th-century British movement, with its vast array of plenitude, nature, its rosy-cheeked subjects, its air of whimsicality and mystery, at first glance, seems nothing out of the ordinary. I always thought they looked like visual renditions of fairytales. But as with much of European history, these artworks reveal darker secrets once you delve beyond their alluring surfaces.
And where else would you find these secrets, but in the very colour? In The Beguiling of Merlin (1873-1877) by Burne-Jones, we notice instantly the contrast between the youth on the right, and the aged, wizened man on the left. The painting depicts an Arthurian legend in which Merlin has fallen in love with Nimue. Merlin, the old man, has an air of something unsettling, vaguely threatening, but also calm. Even Nimue seems calm, but her eyes betray her, and the wind that sweeps through the scene brings some dynamism to the story.
Aside from the composition, the first thing that stands out is the artist’s refined colour palette. The canvas is awash with a subtle storm-cloud-like blue that both characters are clad in. Olive green permeates the scene, and the background is speckled with the first signs of spring – white flowers.
Jones has used something like burnt umber for the rogue ground, a colour that appears to perfectly match the muddy landscape of pastoral areas. All-in-all, the painting feels like the characters are both dwarfed by and part of nature, but we can analyse this a lot further. This particular burnt umber is actually called ‘mummy brown’ – made from real mummies, their bodies ground up and turned to paint by Western artists who travelled to Egypt.
What seems like an unassuming colour was used countless times in the 19th century, and suddenly, the works of the Pre-Raphaelites take on a new meaning. Another artist notorious for using this pigment is Holman Hunt, whose paintings like The Light of the World (1854) (which can be seen in Manchester Art Gallery) and The Shadow of Death (1873) were deeply informed by his privileged position as a white, Western male. Hunt uses mummy brown in The Shadow of Death, where he paints Christ as a carpenter, stretching after a long day and surrounded by elements of his work that appear to be other things; shavings of wood look like gold, for instance.
Hunt travelled the East in search of the people and settings that he was conscious Christ was surrounded by, thus adding layers to his understanding of Christ’s life, and more purpose to his art. By deliberately employing the use of mummy brown, Hunt was indirectly attesting to the fact that the very pigment he used was a material that lived at the time of Christ – the mummies that were ground up were his contemporaries.
Despite how calm and unassuming Pre-Raphaelite paintings are, it is increasingly important to further our understanding of them, their materiality, and the colonialist themes that are wedged deep inside their very making – to question what it is that we are admiring, and whether the artists themselves really were people to admire.
