In 1985, when the Birmingham Art Gallery celebrated the centenary of its foundation, it did so with a book entitled By the Gains of Industry. Now, in 2024, it is time to celebrate the reopening of its refurbished buildings. It has chosen to do so with an exhibition of its proudest possession: an exceptional group of paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites and of pictures and decorative art by their contemporaries, followers, and associates. The title? All too predictably in the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is “Victorian Radicals.”
The labels, accordingly, judge works on grounds of political correctness, and two great paintings, Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England (1855) and William Holman Hunt’s The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1860), are consigned to a separate rogues’ gallery. The Last of Englandis a vivid image of two young people anxiously seeking their fortune overseas. It fails, we are told, to acknowledge sufficiently the evils of the economic system that drives them from home and, still worse, the colonial intrusion of which they will be guilty when they arrive in Australia. Hunt’s use of authentically Jewish models from the East End of London for the figures in the Temple, meanwhile, is a condescending act of cultural appropriation. It is not difficult to impose anachronistic readings of this kind on works of art. It can, however, have unexpected consequences, and the curators here fall foul of their own choice of title. Having been announced as