Victorian Art in Britain

John Brett was a London painter. He had a success at the Royal Academy in 1858 with “The Stonebreaker” one of the great Pre-Raphaelite social comment pictures, which was highly praised by Ruskin. In the next year he produced the remarkable Pre-Raphaelite landscape “Val d’ Aosta,” yet again the subject of much comment from Ruskin. Following this he started to produce the highly geologically accurate and vivid coastal scenes which occupied him for the rest of his life.

Brett lived in Putney, with his wife Mary and their three sons and four daughters. All the children looked lively, spirited, and perhaps a little cheeky-not repressed little Victorians, I’m pleased to say. They lived in a house entirely designed on practical principles. It had asphalt floors, vaulted brick ceilings, central heating, and electric power. Beatrix Potter in her journal, described him as a “prodigiously hairy person.” As well as the obligatory beard-which was vast, he had a hairy nose and ears.   To be regarded as prodigiously hairy in the late nineteenth century was itself, perhaps, an achievement?

DEATH NOTICE - The Times Thursday January 9th 1902

BRETT. On 7^th January at Dairyfield, Putney. John Brett ARA aged 70, the eldest son of Captain Charles Curtis Brett,  11th Lancers.

OBITUARY

    The Royal Academy has suffered another loss following quickly upon that of Mr Onslow Ford, by the death of Mr John Brett which occurred on Tuesday at his residence in Putney. Every year on the walls of Burlington House were to be found studies of sea and rocks which this artist had made so familiar. Cornwall and the Channel Isles were his favourite haunts. The rich colours of the sea in those parts had great attractions for him, and his vivid blues and greens formed one of the more striking characteristics of his work. He painted at different times at many places along the South Coast. Wherever he could find calm seas and sunny skies and seaweedy cliffs sloping to the strand, there he was content to pitch his easel and to produce the vivid, luminous renderings of such scenes which gained him so many admirers. In early life he came strongly under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Over an early picture of his “The Stonebreaker” Ruskin grew enthusiastic. “It is a marvellous picture,” he wrote “and may be examined inch by inch with delight,” and again “I know no such thistledown, no such chalk hills, and elm trees, no such natural pieces of faraway cloud.” The picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1850. The following year Brett showed his famous “Val d’ Aosta” to which he endeavoured, not without success to carry out the principles of Pre-Raphaelitism in landscape painting. Very few artists tried to do this, though Holman Hunt, in addition to Brett, showed that the aims of the school could be illustrated by landscape as well as by romantic drawn figure pictures. The elaborate fidelity to nature, and the exactness in recording for which the Pre-Raphaelites worked continued to appear in Brett’s paintings long after the first flush of his early enthusiasm had died away. The beautiful sea-pictures that he has painted for so long were full of patient, careful work, and they showed clearly that the artist was still influenced by the passionate love of nature and by the reverence for natural objects which the Pre-Raphaelites so strongly felt.

    Mr Brett, who has died at the age of seventy, continued to paint up to the closing years of his life. In the Royal Academy of last summer he had six pictures, studies, as usual, of coast scenery. Of late years it had been noticed that he showed some tendency towards hardness of colour and to exaggeration of qualities that made his work popular. But this was no more than a sign of creeping age. At his best John Brett was a painter of very considerable charm. It should be added that he was of a disposition which made him little inclined to court publicity. Outside the circle of his friends very little was known about his life or his methods. He was elected ARA in 1881.

18 January 2005.