American Heroes and British Heroines in Scenes of Arthurian Legends Through the Eyes of the Brandywine School and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The adventurous spirit of nineteenth-century America comes through in action-filled images created by painters of the Brandywine School, including N.C. Wyeth and his mentor Howard Pyle. Their numerous illustrations for books and magazines such as Harper's, McClure's, and Scribner's appeared in homes across America, bringing exciting stories of pirates, bandits, cowboys, and gun fighters to life. And after the renaissance of interest in medieval lore sparked in part by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Wyeth and Pyle portrayed the knights of Camelot, embellishing Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century Arthurian tales of male heroism and dangerous undertakings as a means to reflect America’s unfettered zeitgeist and to entice their American audiences.

In contrast, the British Pre-Raphaelites focused more often on Arthurian damsels in distress. Although the medieval backgrounds and wardrobes were similar, Pre-Raphaelite images share little with their American counterparts. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, together with William Holman-Hunt, John Waterhouse, John Everett Millais, and William Morris laid emphasis on mythic heroines, confined in aesthetically pleasing settings. Their symbolic imagery referenced the gendered traditions of the feminine role. Underscoring the patriarchal dominance of Victorian society, these artists reinforced women’s obedience and acquiescence, as their female protagonists gently accepted their fates and suffered the consequences of their behavior rather than take action to improve their situations. The British Pre-Raphaelites deliberately promoted feminine gender expectations of passivity, whereas the American Brandywine illustrators, with their emphasis on exploits of the active masculine figures, gave little consideration to the personhood of the female characters that populated the tales of King Arthur.