As The Indepedent and other news media reported on 17 August 2019, the UK’s Arts Minister Rebecca Pow has placed an export ban on the painting Ferdinand Lured By Ariel (1850) by the Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais. The painting depicts a scene from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (RCEWA) recommended an export ban because of the detail of the natural life observed in the garden setting, and, more importantly, because the theme, the garden setting, and the artist were considered to be quintessentially English in character.
Pow called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood “a key part of British history and this is why we must keep this important work in the country.” RCEWA member Peter Barder called the painting “a summation of everything English. A novel interpretation of an episode from Shakespeare, it is set in a minutely observed English garden in the summer. [...] Such close observation was unique to the Pre-Raphaelites, one of the very few distinctively British art movements. An epitome of its type and of Englishness, I hope a British institution will find the means to keep it in this country”.
The comments pinpoint the conscious invocation of tradition (and that meant, almost by default, English tradition) by the Pre-Raphaelites; they also show how that programme of “Englishness” has meanwhile become a key factor in the assignment of value to their work; what is more, an Englishness that reponds to the Pre-Raphaelite nostalgic taste for Shakespeare, country gardens, and Victorian eye-candy aesthetics.

As an imagologist I am often asked by my social-scientific or social-historical colleagues how I can determine the representativity of the literary material I study. If, in studying the English image of Italy, I draw on George Eliot and E.M. Foster, is that not a very restricted and rarefied data sample, almost a random stab in the dark? What wider conclusions could possibly be drawn from such a minute sample regarding ‘the’ image of Italy in England, or attitudes generally vis-à-vis Italy as current in England?

That ‘representativity’ challenge is irrelevant and pernicious, and should be rejected out of hand. It imposes on the humanities an entire set of assumptions and working methods that are alien and uncongenial to it, beginning with the idea  (too ingrained to be consciously reflected upon, let alone queried) that what we study are selected samples as proxy data for a larger whole – that larger whole being, ideally, society as such.
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