Dear, good, kind, sacrificing Little Nell. Here she is kneeling by a wayside pond, bonnet pushed back, shoes and stockings off, while she rests her blistered feet. She scoops a palm of water with cupped hands and tenderly washes those of her grandfather: her feckless, gambling, on-the-lam grandfather. It is an old Oscar Wilde chestnut, but one would have to have a heart of stone to look at William Holman Hunt’s portrait of Charles Dickens’s saintly ‘Little Nell and her Grandfather’ (1845) without laughing.
Likewise Arthur Hughes’s ‘The Woodman’s Child’ (1860), a portrait of a tousle-haired country mite sleeping in the woods, attended by a squirrel and robin, their red coat and breast so sweetly matching her own little ruby socks. Bambi, one imagines, is waiting to gambol into frame.
The Pre-Raphaelites assembled for the Liverpool Walker Gallery’s Pre-Raphaelites: Beauty and Rebellion show do lay the pathos on thick. Titles are twee, treacly or tearful: Daniel Alexander Williamson’s ‘The Startled Rabbit’ (1862); James Campbell’s ‘Twilight — Trudging Homeward’ (1857) and ‘Waiting for Legal Advice’ (1857); John Ingle Lee’s ‘Sweethearts and Wives’ (1860).
Faced with all this Little Nellery, you thrill to the vampish Lady of the Lake in Edward Burne-Jones’s ‘The Beguiling of Merlin’ (1872–7).
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