Brickdale’s Idylls Re-Viewed

This essay resituates Brickdale in her time, the Edwardian period, rather than the—by that time—rather passé era of the Pre-Raphaelites. Although indebted to the earlier artists, she is more accurately conceived of as, in Kyle Stoneman’s felicitous phrase, a ‘neo-Pre-Raphaelite.’ From this perspective, a close reading of her Arthurian images helps to clarify her difference and, perhaps, suggest a new assessment of her originality, although, in the absence of essential biographical sources, any attempt to define her program must remain extremely tentative.