Old masters of a brave new world

PRINCES OF VICTORIAN BOHEMIA H

National Portrait Gallery

WHEN the 19th century painter David Wilkie Wynfield decided to photograph his fellow artists in the style of Old Master paintings, it would have been inconceivable to him that, in the year 2000, we would have found these images so easy to assimilate into our contemporary culture. Though distanced by time and technology, we are so familiar with photography's ability to play with the real that, without much difficulty, we can place these photographs alongside the most up-to-date products of the present-day art world.

Wynfield belonged to a group of young male artists known as the St John's Wood Clique.

They were excited by the possibilities that art offered and intrigued by the new bohemian-ism emerging in Europe, yet remained resolutely English and fundamentally conservative. Dressing up and posing was, for Wynfield's artist friends - who included Frederic Leighton, Edward Burne-Jones and William Holman Hunt - a stern and masculine affair. His sitters, unlike those of his contemporary and admirer, the portraitist Julia Margaret Cameron, were more collaborators than subjects. Equal in status and occupation, they seem as determined as Wynfield to create an enduring picture of a noble race of man, expressed through their recreation of the characters of painting's past.

This idea of a brotherhood of artists, flirting with bohemianism, yet remaining firmly fixed in Victorian values, dominated the avant- garde in the mid-19th century. Far from rejecting (as the Bloomsbury set did so firmly in the next century) the idea of King and Country, Wynfield's group were truly brothers in arms to the extent of becoming members of the Artists Rifle Corps, where Wynfield rose to the rank of captain.

Photography attracted many of the new bohemians; it was new and revolutionary and could represent the real world in a way painting could not.

The possibilities of this new medium were immense, and the difficulties posed by its cumbersome technology made it satisfyingly out of reach to the ordinary man or woman and fit to be used to portray a brotherhood of artists.

Wynfield's small, richly toned portraits, staid and somewhat repetitious in their composition, nevertheless convey a real sense of longing, perhaps for an imagined past when male identity was less trammelled by Victorian conventions and expectations. For so many of the artists' groups emerging at the same time as Wynfield's clique the looming of industrial Britain, of accelerating technology and social change, offered both terrors and delights.

To retreat into a world of princes and courtiers, to wear a laurel wreath or an Elizabethan ruff and, ironically enough, to use the new medium of photography to record the process, must have seemed a magical way to recreate a male past which had so irrevocably disappeared.

*Until 14 May. Admission free.

Ratings: m adequate H good, ** very good, *** outstanding, X poor

Copyright 2000
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