David Wilkie was a hugely popular narrative artist telling stories in his pictures about English village life. He was one of Charles Dickens' favourite painters.
To some extent his work was modelled on the seventeenth century work of Dutch genre painters, much admired in the early nineteenth century. It also influenced the work of artists who turned their attention from rural life to the lives of the growing middle classes.
One of those artists was W. P. Frith who became both rich and famous in his representation of the lives of this class in huge and imposing canvases. Stories dominated his epics depicting the activities of the middle classes.
As art became more accessible and still more popular there was a widespread demand for pictures that entertained and instructed; for pictures that told stories and told them with stongly moral tendencies.
The Pre-Raphaelites, though they reacted against this prescriptive tendency were not immune to the demand for narrative. Collins's 'Convent Thoughts', for example, is full of implicit narrative impulses, but shifts them in the direction of symbols and emblems.
Similarly, Hunt's 'Hierling Shepherd' works at several levels. It celebrates rural life and its healthiness, it tells a story about the negligent farm-hand bought in to look after the sheep; but beneath it all is an allegory about the state of the Church in Britain, tempted into false pre-occupations by the temptations of Catholicism.
In the mid-1850, Millais moved closer to pictures without narrative impulses. His 'Apple Blossoms' offers an image of a group of young girls having a picnic of porridge in an orchard. What conceptual meaning that can be extracted from this must lie in the realm of a meditation on youth, transience and death, though nothing is spelled out.
Millais's masterpiece in this mode is 'Autumn Leaves' - again a picture which, with is sunset, autumn and bonfire in the company of a group of young women, is replete with associations of the passing of life. 'All flesh is as grass' comes to mind, as do many other biblical texts, but the finally the picture resists these the specificity of narrative construction.
Rossetti's solution lay in his return to myth and mythological structures. His large and powerful drawing of Mary Magdalene visiting the house of Simon is a far more resolved expression of the issues raised in 'Found'. Mary's vision of Christ that no others can see sanctifies her sexuality in an image that realism could not hope to capture. Narrative still plays a part, but in a very subordinate role.
The sentiments of the drawing are dramatised and expanded in Rossetti's accompanying sonnet.
