"You will have the goodness to discharge from your minds all Post-Raphael ideas, all religious aspirations, all elevating thoughts, all tender, awful, sorrowful, ennobling, sacred, graceful, or beautiful associations, and to prepare yourselves, as befits such a subject - Pre-Raphaelly considered - for the lowest depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting. You behold the interior of a carpenter’s shop. In the foreground of that carpenter’s shop is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed-gown, who appears to have received a poke in the hand, from the stick of another boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest ginshop in England."
Charles Dickens in his journal Household Words, 1850-06-15
See also "The Myths and History of Red Hair":
www.themythsandhistoryofredhair.co.uk/poetspainters.html
More:
www.academia.edu/10062371/Red-headed_Boys
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Götz Kluge said:
[top]: John Everett Millais: Christ in the House of His Parents aka The Carpenter's Shop (1850).
Location: Tate Britain (N03584), London.
Literature:
* Deborah Mary Kerr (1986): John Everett Millais's Christ in the house of his parents (circle.ubc.ca/handle/2429/26546)
p.34 in (01) Éva Péteri (2003): Victorian Approaches to Religion as Reflected in the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, Budapest 2003, ISBN 978-9630580380 (shortlink: www.snrk.de/EvaPeteri.htm)
* Albert Boime (2008): Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848-1871
p. 225-364: The Pre-Raphaelites and the 1848 Revolution (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0226063283)
[bottom]: Anonymous: Edward VI and the Pope, An Allegory of Reformation, mirrored view (16th century, NPG 4165). Iconoclasm depicted in the window. Under the "window" 3rd from left is Thomas Cranmer who wrote the 42 Articles in 1552.
Edward VI and the Pope (NPG 4165) was, until 1874, the property of Thomas Green, Esq., of Ipswich and Upper Wimpole Street, a collection 'Formed by himself and his Family during the last Century and early Part of the present Century' (Roy C. Strong: Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, 1969, p.345). Thus, when Millais' Christ in the House of His Parents ('The Carpenter's Shop') was painted in 1849-1850, the 16th century painting was part of a private collection. It was sold by Christie's 20 March 1874 (lot 9) to a buyer unknown to me, that is, when Holiday started with his illustrations to The Hunting of the Snark.
Location: National Portrait Gallery, London
Götz Kluge said: