Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolists and the occult revival

Your goal in this lesson: to meet the nineteenth-century artists who filled their pictures with sorceresses, dreams and mystic symbols, and to see how this world produced the tarot images many of us read today.

The Pre-Raphaelites

Historical In 1848, three young students at the Royal Academy in London, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They rejected the smooth academic style they blamed on Raphael’s followers, and looked back to medieval and early Renaissance art for bright color, sharp detail and serious feeling. A second wave followed, including Edward Burne-Jones and the designer William Morris, who turned the dream of the Middle Ages into tapestries, books and wallpaper.

Their subjects came from legend, poetry and the Bible: Arthurian knights, Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, saints and enchantresses. Burne-Jones’s The Love Song, at the Met, shows a knight, a musician and a winged figure in a twilight garden, a mood more than a story. See Pre-Raphaelites and Arts and Crafts.

Sorceresses and Lilith

Historical The painter John William Waterhouse, who admired the Pre-Raphaelites, painted The Magic Circle in 1886: a robed woman draws a circle of fire around herself with a wand, while ravens and a toad wait outside. Rossetti painted Lady Lilith (1866 to 1868), a woman combing her long hair before a mirror, with his sonnet “Body’s Beauty” on the frame. I describe that painting in words only, because it shows bare shoulders and I do not choose artworks with nudity for these lessons; you can see it on the Delaware Art Museum’s website.

Later tradition Rossetti’s Lilith comes from Jewish folklore, but his version is a Victorian fantasy of the dangerous, beautiful woman. If you are taking the Lilith course, notice how far this image is from the ancient sources. Read the close reading of The Magic Circle.

Symbolism: the inner world

Historical In 1886 the poet Jean Moréas published a Symbolist manifesto in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro. Symbolist artists turned away from what the eye sees toward dreams, myth, mysticism and the inner life. Gustave Moreau painted jeweled saints and sphinxes; Odilon Redon drew floating eyes and strange creatures in charcoal, then late in life burst into color with glowing flowers. See Symbolism.

Historical Esoteric groups were close to this world. From 1892 to 1897 the writer Joséphin Péladan, who called himself “Sâr”, organized six Salons de la Rose+Croix in Paris, exhibitions of idealist and mystical art. His Rosicrucianism was his own invention, not a survival of the seventeenth-century manifestos. In London, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in 1888, and it shaped modern ceremonial magic and tarot.

A tarot deck as art

Historical In 1909 the London publisher William Rider and Son issued a tarot deck designed by A. E. Waite, a Golden Dawn member, and illustrated by the artist Pamela Colman Smith. Smith drew a full scene for every one of the 78 cards, including the 56 Minor Arcana, which in most older decks showed only patterns of suit symbols. Those scenes are why so many beginners can read her cards from the pictures. See Pamela Colman Smith and her card The Hermit.

Modern Today we often call the deck Rider-Waite-Smith, to credit the woman who drew it. That is a modern correction, and a fair one.

Try this

Today’s exercise: look at Waterhouse’s The Magic Circle on the artwork page for ten minutes. List every object and creature inside and outside the circle. Then write one sentence on what the circle separates, and mark it as your interpretation.

Quick recap

• The Pre-Raphaelites (1848) looked back to medieval art and legend.
• Waterhouse and Rossetti painted sorceresses and Lilith as Victorian fantasies.
• Symbolists painted the inner world; Péladan’s salons gave mystic art a stage.
• Pamela Colman Smith gave every tarot card a scene in 1909.

Keep going

Next: Modern art and the spiritual. Need a refresher? Go back to From Baroque light to Romantic night or see the whole course. For more, see Art Nouveau, the esoteric in art and the 1909 tarot gallery.

Sources

• E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (London: Phaidon, 1950).
• Jean Moréas, “Le Symbolisme”, Le Figaro, 18 September 1886.
• A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: William Rider and Son, 1910).
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Edward Burne-Jones, The Love Song, accession 47.26.

Go deeper: the art movements timeline and art history pages on this site

Mark as done