The Greenery in the Pre-Raphaelites’ Paintings: Aesthetics, Gardening, and Land Ethics

The Pre-Raphaelite artist Millais painted 'Autumn Leaves', portraying a sentimental image of young girls burning falling leaves. The painting received wide recognition; however, another artist, Brown, who was in the same art circle, painted another autumn landscape (also with images of a young man and woman and burning leaves) and received critic Ruskin's comment as being "ugly" since Brown included all the actual scenes of the neighborhood (e.g., raising poultry and growing vegetables). This research aims to explore how these images reveal the problem of land usage in the urban fringe and foresee the fashion of home gardening (growing edible plants). If so, this represents the actual dragging between visual pleasure (aesthetics) and economics: should the land be sold and developed or reserved to grow plants to nurture humans and animals? This question involves mortality, aesthetics, and visual representation.