Reflections: Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites review – not worth a look

National Gallery, London
This is a sham of a show comparing the clumsy daubs of a group of mediocre pseudo-intellectuals against great artists such as Van Eyck and Velázquez

The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood are the most successful frauds in art history. These mediocre Victorian painters knitted together a pseudo-intellectual style from bits of John Ruskin’s theories, quotations of popular poems and pretentious artistic references. Their very name reveals their heavy handed historicism, as they claimed to rescue the pure art of the early Renaissance from the refined classicism of Raphael. A dusty debate to be sure.

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