Victorian Visual Culture

“Victorian Masterpieces from the Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico” is currently an exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, New York. When searching for current exhibits, the pieces within this collection caught my eye as they hold more in common than the provided description of Victorian paintings from the Museo de Arte de Ponce. The exhibit pieces are The Prince Enters the Wood by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, The King and His Court by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, The Sleeping Beauty by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Flaming June by Frederic, Lord Leighton, and The Escape of a Heretic, 1559 by Sir John Everett Millais.

The purpose of the exhibit is to display prominent Victorian paintings that have not been able to be on display due the Museo de Arte de Ponce being closed from earthquakes. This gives the audience the ability to not only see pieces that have been hidden from public view since 2020 but also for a different regional audience to gain access to the paintings. The ability to create an exhibit that only adds to the current Victorian paintings at The Met allows a further understanding of Victorian visual culture as more themes can be viewed next to each other.

By looking at just the work within the exhibit, however, the audience can see a persisting presence of vulnerable positions in all of the paintings. All of the Edward Burne-Jones paintings belong to a series The Legend of Briar Rose that includes one more painting that is not included in the collection. The three Burne-Jones painting showcase a variety of groups in unnatural positions of what could be deemed sleep or death. Additionally, there is one person in each that is elevated above the rest, whether this is someone stumbling across the scene and thus the only person awake, as in The Prince Enters the Wood or as someone who is in the same sleep as the rest but their body is physically elevated above everyone else as in The King and His Court and The Sleeping Beauty.

This theme is not absent from the other two artists’ paintings, however. The most similar is that of Lord Leighton’s Flaming June, which depicts a young women sleeping under the sun. This piece does not have the same deathly stillness that is seen in the Briar Rose collection. Instead, the subject is flushed from the sun, wearing a bright orange gown that matches the vibrancy from her skin and hair, resting from a matter of exertion from the day.

The final painting, The Escape of a Heretic, 1559, at first appears drastically different than the prior pieces. The main subjects, a young woman with a yellow fabric hanging in front of her otherwise dark dress and a young man with a knife above and behind her head. Just out of focus and behind the two is an older man, obscured by a white fabric across his lower face and neck. However, upon closer inspection, the audience can see a rosary wrapped around his mouth and above the fabric with his eyes wide and hands behind his back. By reading the description, the audience learns that the young woman is fleeing during the Spanish Inquisition. The older, gagged man, a friar, looks on as the young man, disguised as a friar, helps to disguise the young woman in religious robes. A scene that at first appears to be threatening revealed to be an act of escape from the church they dress themselves as. There are not, however, any subjects that could be likened to sleep. If this collection is viewed instead as a recognition of vulnerability, however, there is a better connection between the pieces in the exhibit.

From the existence of groups that cannot be understood as asleep or dead to a sleeping women within a frame, existing to be viewed in the exposed state, to both the man tied and the woman escaping him, all scenes displayed in the collection force an understanding onto the audience of the risk for vulnerability. The vulnerable, each joining other paintings by their same artist, such as Leighton’s Flaming June with Lachrymae, the Briar Rose series with The Love Song, and The Flight of a Heretic, 1559 with Ariel, while also leaving the collection of Victorian art that Museo de Arte de Ponce has curated.

Open until February 2024, I hope to visit to experience a greater collection of Victorian paintings before they return home to Puerto Rico. It would a unique experience to be able to view such paintings near their natural counterparts, unveiling a multitude of stories that represent the basis of human experience in it’s most vulnerable state.

Works Cited

“El Metropolitan Museum of Art de Nueva York Presentará Cinco Obras Maestras Del Arte Victoriano Prestadas Por El Museo de Arte de Ponce.” Museo de Arte de Ponce, 1 Sept. 2022, museoarteponce.org/el-metropolitan-museum-of-art-de-nueva-york-presentara-cinco-obras-maestras-del-arte-victoriano-prestadas-por-el-museo-de-arte-de-ponce/. Accessed 15 Dec. 2023.

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/ponce-loans/exhibition-objects. Accessed 14 Dec. 2023.