Once upon a time, there was an art scholar called John. He spent his days admiring marble statues, his nights in praying that he might be allowed a real-life statue as his wife. And in due course, he met a beautiful girl. She was a bit younger than him, but that was OK, because it meant she would be easier to control. Her name was Good Reputation, which seemed promising too. But on the wedding night, John got a nasty shock. For on lifting her trousseau, he found that, unlike the statues in the museums, Good Reputation had pubic hair. He was aghast. Unable to consummate the marriage, he channelled all his energies into his writing. This proved a mistake, for along came an artist who wasn’t so fussy, and John was left all on his own.
No fairy tale, this is the story of the marriage of the art critic John Ruskin, the author of The Stones of Venice, to Euphemia (known as Effie) Gray, who divorced him in favour of the painter John Everett Millais, causing the scandal of the 1850s. It forms the first panel, as it were, of Wives and Stunners, Henrietta Garnett’s engaging triptych of doomed mid-Victorian relationships. The second features Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his model and mistress Lizzie Siddal; the third, Edward Burne-Jones and his model and mistress Maria Zambaco.
These three — Millais, Rossetti and Burne-Jones — were arguably the greatest painters of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, that endearing if somewhat irrelevant enterprise begun in London in 1848, when a group of idealistic young men vowed to devote their art to verisimilitude and high moral purpose. In the event, they also spent a lot of their time loafing around the West End, trying to get laid. They dubbed their beautiful pick-ups ‘stunners’, asked them to pose, and soon after put down their palettes and pounced.
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