ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a specific act of return in 1878 when Ruskin, in the pages of the Nineteenth Century, went back to consider Pre-Raphaelitism, that much misunderstood and longstanding enthusiasm, and to revisit a controversial subject of many years' concern. It examines The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism and analyses the terms of Ruskin's rhetoric, firstly by comparing it with features of the 1853 Edinburgh lecture on Pre-Raphaelitism. In considering the constitutive features of Ruskin's gaze there, the factors that pressure upon it and give it a particular focus, the chapter also analyses the implications of his reading of the female body for the transmission of ideology and the performance of gender roles. The politics of Three Colours was also a gender politics. Inscribing the Brotherhood with an overtly masculine identity in 1853, Ruskin’s thinking about the Pre-Raphaelites in 1878 dwelt upon their representations of the female.
