In a recent interview, actor Timothée Chalamet stirred up controversy by saying ‘no one cares’ about ballet and opera anymore, and defenders of both art forms took to social media to set the record straight. Many argued that just because something isn’t to someone’s taste doesn’t mean it’s lost its value. Alex Beard, who runs The Royal Ballet and Opera, said ticket sales have actually increased thanks to the attention. It’s funny how one offhand remark can spark a conversation about what matters in culture and how easily personal opinion is mistaken for universal truth.
Here’s The Royal Ballet and Opera’s Instagram response to Chalamet’s comments:
When people say no one cares, they often just mean that they don’t care, or that their friends don’t care. That’s not the same thing.
This pattern is longstanding.
Admirers of Pre-Raphaelite art know this script by heart.
The Day Dream, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Founded in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite movement challenged stale academic routines. The Brotherhood sought sharper observation, richer symbolism, and more focus on beauty, nature, and emotion. It was never just decorative. It was meant to matter.
In the twentieth century, the Pre-Raphaelites were often criticized as excessive, sentimental, or embarrassingly lush. ‘Overly sentimental’ was a common rebuke, but the real issue often lay in the open expression of strong emotion.
Importantly, this issue is not confined to Victorian England or the mid-twentieth century. Even today, some critics continue to dismiss Pre-Raphaelite art.
Jonathan Jones observed that ‘a lot of critics disdain this period,’ and in his review of the Burne-Jones exhibition at Tate Britain several years ago, he described it as ‘how boring beauty can be’ and declared Burne-Jones to be ‘a stupid artist.’
The Beguiling of Merlin, Sir Edward Burne-Jones
These attitudes may seem discerning, but are often habitual. Beauty is dismissed as superficial, narrative as naive, and emotion as weakness. Critics can appear more unsettled by art that evokes strong responses than by art that fails to engage.
Here, Chalamet’s episode and the Pre-Raphaelite story meet. Both show how personal dislike is confused with cultural judgment, and how authority figures shape what is deemed significant.
A recurring pattern of scorn
Ballet and opera are called elitist or dull. Pre-Raphaelite art is labeled sentimental, decorative, or excessive. The terms change, but critics persistently dismiss them, then act surprised or scornful when the public remains interested.
Nevertheless, audiences continue to attend these performances and exhibitions.
This persistence is key. However labeled by critics, audiences engage. This is not naivety. Audiences see what critics overlook: beauty, atmosphere, emotion, and art that invite appreciation.
Of course, this does not mean all criticism is wrong.
Acknowledging that critics can be dismissive does not suggest that critique itself is unnecessary.
Some Pre-Raphaelite works are uneven or excessive. Some raise questions about gender, idealization, medievalism, empire, and the politics of beauty. Those questions matter; serious criticism helps us see and understand more.
However, it is important to distinguish between critique and contempt.
Critique involves careful and thoughtful examination. Contempt feels performative and superficial.
Personal dislike does not constitute cultural judgment.
It’s easy to conflate personal dislikes with genuine judgment. Historically, critics have often proclaimed the demise of art forms they did not favor, confusing personal opinion with cultural fact.
Yet these art forms persist.
They live on because they are vital.
Art endures through those who passionately engage it. Its vitality comes from devoted audiences: proof that meaning and value are not bestowed by critics, but earned by ongoing, genuine appreciation.
We seem to imagine spring as soft and feminine by default: mild weather, pastel colors, and a dreamy sense of renewal. Decorative rather than forceful.
In his painting Gentle Spring, Victorian artist Frederick Sandys leans into that visual language, yet he gives it more gravity. His central figure represents Proserpina (Persephone) returning from the underworld, and knowing the subject gives the image a sense of shadow.
She doesn’t skip or scatter petals with cheerful abandon. She advances with composure, less a girl in a garden than an embodiment of return.
That distinction matters.
Because Gentle Spring belongs to a long nineteenth-century habit of making women carry ideas larger than themselves: spring, virtue, beauty, grief, nations, seasons, salvation, doom.
Femininity in art is often asked to symbolize life rather than simply live it.
Gentle Spring, Frederick Sandys
There is restraint in her posture and a seriousness in her facial expression. And a sense that spring is not arriving untouched but returning from difficulty, which is spot on for a representation of Proserpina. That symbolism leaves room for the realization that renewal is rarely as innocent as it often looks in paintings.
That is part of what makes the beginning of spring such a charged subject.
We celebrate it, but we also project onto it.
As if we ask it to heal the whole year in a single gesture.
And there is a cultural question to ponder: when a woman becomes the image of spring, who is being renewed? Her, or the viewer?
Beauty is never just beauty; it is arrangement, emphasis, and framing. Who is seen, how they are framed, what they are asked to mean, and none of that is neutral. Victorian artists knew this perfectly well, even when they dressed the fact in flowers.
(Especially when they dressed the fact in flowers.)
Yet I do not think Gentle Spring collapses into cynicism. The painting still has real emotional resonance, and its pleasures do not ring false because they are constructed.
All art is constructed.
The point is to notice what the construction is doing.
What this one does, especially at the beginning of spring, is offer renewal without pretending renewal is simple. The rainbow arches, but the dark sky still holds its clouds. The landscape blooms, but within the new growth and bright colors there is still the promise of turbulent weather.
That feels true to the season.
Spring is not a Technicolor pastel reset. It is the world resuming itself, unevenly and in earnest. It is beauty and blooms, as well as thorns and storms.
And perhaps that is why Gentle Spring remains worth returning to: not because it gives us a flawless emblem of the season, but because it reminds us that beginnings can be lovely without being naive. And I find something very human in that.
Let us open the parlor door a crack. A cold wind slips in. Someone murmurs “witch.” Someone else whispers “fashion.”
And there she stands: Sidonia von Bork.
Equal parts legend, literature, and lightning rod, she seems to saunter straight out of Wilhelm Meinhold’s Gothic romance and into Edward Burne-Jones’ paintbox like she pays rent there. (She does not.)
First: Who is Sidonia, and why was everyone clutching their pearls?
Sidonia was as a real historical figure: Sidonia von Borcke (1548–1620), who was a Pomeranian noblewoman who was later tried and executed for witchcraft in Stettin (today Szczecin).
Her story gathered myths the way velvet gathers lint: quickly, dramatically, and with a certain inevitability.
Then the nineteenth century came along, an era that adored a good shiver, and said: “What if we made her… more?”
Enter Wilhelm Meinhold, who wrote Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe (published 1847–1848). You can read it free online at Project Gutenberg.
Wilhelm Meinhold
In his telling, Sidonia becomes a grand Gothic engine: beauty, grievance, power, menace, basically all the elements we still see in fictionalized Femme Fatales.
And because English readers love a delicious import, Jane Wilde (mother of Oscar), writing as “Francesca Speranza”, then translated it into English as Sidonia the Sorceress in 1849. (Flip through a digitized version at Archive.org.)
Pre-Raphaelites promptly took one look and said, in essence: “Yes. We’ll have that.”
Lady Jane Wilde
The Pre-Raphaelite Taste for “Beautiful Trouble”
The Pre-Raphaelites (and their orbit) had a fondness for women who arrived with a certain atmosphere.
Saints with sorrow. Queens with complicated backstories. Enchantresses with impeccable hair.
Sidonia fits right in: she is not merely wicked; she is composed, as though her evil nature is simply a kind of interior decorating choice.
And now, behold the pivot from page to pigment.
Sidonia von Bork, Sir Edward Burne-Jones
Burne-Jones Paints Sidonia (And Gives Her a Dress That Basically Has a Plot)
In 1860, the young Edward Burne-Jones created Sidonia von Bork 1560, a watercolour and gouache work now in Tate Britain.
Sidonia turns partly away, as though she’s already bored with our judgment. Her gown is an extraordinary tangle of black looping forms over white. It’s a textile enchantment.
It’s also interesting to note that Burne-Jones wasn’t painting Sidonia in a vacuum. Sidonia was painted as a partner to another Burne-Jones work: Clara von Bork 1560, based on Sidonia’s in-laws..
Clara Von Bork 1560, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones
Clara von Dewitz is the subject here: gentle, loyal, and tragically outmatched. She marries Sidonia’s virtuous cousin, Marcus Bork, stands by Sidonia when she falls into trouble, and is eventually led by her to a gruesome death.
That relationship shows up in the details. Clara holds a nest of fledgling doves, while Sidonia’s black cat (her familiar) looks up at them expectantly.
A Delicious Detail: The Model, the Costume, and the Borrowed Renaissance Glamour
Tate Britain notes that Burne-Jones used Fanny Cornforth, who was at one time Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s model and mistress, as his model for Sidonia. Which is fascinating, because it means the painted Sidonia is not only a character; she’s also a part of a network of studio relationships, muses, rivalries, and the drama often found among relationships in the Pre-Raphaelite circle
Algernon Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Fanny Cornforth, and William Michael Rossetti posing in a sort of mock family portrait in the garden of 16 Cheyne Walk.1859 drawing of Fanny by Dante Gabriel RossettiPhotograph of Fanny CornforthFanny in Fazio’s Misstress, Dante Gabriel RossettiDrawing of Fanny Cornforth by Dante Gabriel RossettiPortrait of Fanny Cornforth, circa 1860, by Dante Gabriel RossettiDrawing of Fanny Cornforth by Dante Gabriel RossettiFair Rosamund, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
And Sidonia’s fabulously serpentine dress? It’s based on a Renaissance reference: the costume was inspired by a portrait of Isabella d’Este by Giulio Romano.
Portrait of Isabella d’Este by Giulio Romano
Both Burne-Jones’ Sidonia von Bork 1560 and Portrait of Isabella d’Este seem to be visual ancestors of the dress worn by Miranda Richardson in Sleepy Hollow (1999)directed by Tim Burton. As Lady Van Tassel, Richardson wears a gown similar to Sidonia’s, with a dense ornamental surface and almost unnaturally controlled elegance.
Burne-Jones paints Sidonia as a figure whose beauty is inseparable from the threat she holds, and that same logic shapes the costuming in Sleepy Hollow. Lady Van Tassel’s clothes do not simply signal wealth or taste; they turn fabric into a kind of narrative misdirection. The effect is quintessentially Burtonesque gothic, theatrical, and faintly funereal, but it also recalls the Pre-Raphaelite habit of female dress carry psychological weight.
In that sense, the resemblance to Sidonia matters not only as an art-historical echo but as a clue to how Sleepy Hollow imagines wicked feminine power: ornate, cultivated, and dangerous enough to look decorative until it is far too late.
The Background Cameo: Court as Theater, Sidonia as Plot Device
In Burne-Jones’ image, Sidonia isn’t alone and the background hints at courtly life, a scene-within-a-scene.
Sidonia is perhaps plotting another outrage at the court of the dowager Duchess of Wolgast, where her earliest crimes began. The Duchess herself can be seen approaching in the distance.
And that’s exactly how Meinhold’s Sidonia operates: she moves through court culture like a chaotic storm, and everyone feels her presence. Consequences, of course, follow.
Is she truly supernatural? Or merely a woman made monstrous by a society eager to punish inconvenient power?
The Victorian imagination, ever thirsty, happily drank both interpretations at once.
The Witch Trial Shadow
It is tempting to stop at the Gothic pleasure of Sidonia von Bork. But Sidonia’s story rests on a darker historical foundation: the very real world of witch trials, social panic, and fear turned into accusation.
Her execution in 1620 is part of that history. So when Burne-Jones paints her as a figure of eerie beauty and charisma, he is working with a subject already shaped by persecution, rumor, and power.
I think that makes the painting more complicated. Its beauty is real, but it is not detached from the violence and suspicion that helped create the legend in the first place.
Why This Pairing Still Hits: Novel + Painting = The Original “Adaptation”
What we’re watching, across Meinhold and Burne-Jones, is a Victorian-era version of something we recognize very well:
A story goes viral. The image makers pick it up. A character becomes an aesthetic. And the aesthetic outlives the plot.
Meinhold supplies the narrative machine (1847–48). Jane Wilde supplies the English-language spark (1849). Burne-Jones supplies the image you can’t forget (1860).
Sidonia becomes, almost inevitably, an icon and we continue to see her DNA in fictional characters.
She’s the “dangerous woman,” the “bewitching woman,” the “woman who won’t behave.”
And the painting, with its ornate restraint and quietly chilling pose, doesn’t shout. It simply confirms what the world had already decided to see in her.
A Final Parlor Thought (Before She Vanishes Down the Hall)
And If the Pre-Raphaelites still return to us in fashion, visual culture, and through our repeated hunger for certain kinds of feminine myth then Sidonia shows why.
She is story reduced to emblem. The muse with a shadow attached. Beauty sharpened into threat.
Naturally, she will absolutely be the last person to leave the party.
Over the years, the term “Pre-Raphaelite” has wandered far beyond its original meaning. It’s become a modern shorthand for a dress style, a certain mood, or flowing hair.
But when watching Blanche Fury (1948), “Pre-Raphaelite” leapt to mind for a completely different reason. Instead of an abundance of loose curls, Blanche’s pinned hair falls in soft, heavy sections reminiscent of Elizabeth Siddal.
Valerie Hobson as Blanche FuryPainting of Elizabeth Siddal by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1854
It’s that particular Siddal quality, as if the pins in her hair are only suggestions.
Georgiana Burne-Jones once described Siddal’s hair as “very loosely fastened up, so that it fell in soft, heavy wings.” And that is exactly the phrase that kept whispering through my mind as I watched Blanche Fury. Blanche’s hair forms similar wings, giving the impression of weight and softness.
Sketch of Elizabeth Siddal by Dante Gabriel Rossetti on the left, Valerie Hobson as Blanche Fury on the right.Blanche FuryDrawing of Elizabeth Siddal reading by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1854
As for the film itself, this melodramatic gothic tale has plenty of atmosphere, but loses its grip too quickly, like a story that sets up a storm but forgot the lightning it’s been promising.
Interestingly, the people closest to it seemed to feel something similar.
Producer Anthony Havelock-Allen later admitted the film took too long, cost too much, and didn’t connect with audiences the way they’d hoped. He described it as a “hard” film with too much real hatred mixed in with the romance, and not enough of the lush escapism the public wanted at the time.
Actress Valerie Hobson, who was married to Havelock-Allen at the time (and later married the scandalous MP John Profumo) spoke about the film with tenderness. She’d just had their son, who was born with Down’s Syndrome, and she said the film was meant as a “loving gift,” a way to restore her to leading lady status, although she ultimately felt the film didn’t fully work.
And yet: I keep thinking the plot does have strong bones.
Which is why, despite my frequent grumbling about Hollywood’s remake machine, I can’t help imagining a retelling that actually leans into what Blanche Fury only half grasps.
