Pre-Raphaelite paintings at the Frist Museum: Imagine!

Puerto Rico's loss is Nashville's gain this month as the Frist Center for the Visual Arts presents a special exhibit (through May 16; see www.fristcenter.org) called "Masterpieces of European Painting from El Museo de Arte Ponce." These gems - from a museum built in 1959 by collector (& co-founder of the Puerto Rican Pro-statehood Party), Luis Ferre - range from religious iconography circa 1350 to Lovis Corinth's 1910 Expressionist nude "Pregnant Woman."

Perhaps the most appealing artworks on display hang in the last two galleries, among a group of sumptuous paintings by members & adherents of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They were a loose affiliation of anti-academic artists, established in England in 1848 as part of an aesthetic quest for "truth to nature" & ideal beauty. Here is a brief survey of my favorite seven paintings in the entire exhibit:

* "Ysoude with the Love Philter" (oil/canvas, 1870) by Frederick Sandys (1832-1904). A portrait of a demure brown-eyed brunette (elsewhere named Isolde) in semi-profile holding a red rose. Based on the tragic Arthurian legend of a misdirected love-potion, a rich blue hue dominates the color-scheme of this eye-catching work in which symbolic flowers abound.

* "The Escape of a Heretic, 1559" (oil/canvas, 1857) by Sir John Everett Millais (1829-96). In this dramatic scene from the time of the Spanish Inquisition, somber brown tones pervade this depiction of 3 figures: (1) a nobleman/rescuer disguised as a monk aims a dagger at (2) a cowering bound priest/captor, while (3) a beautiful young woman in a robe, partially concealing a heretic's shirt complete with devil & flames, flees the cell with a startled expression. The oppressive interior is relieved by a glimpse of a tree through a tiny window in the background.

* "The School of Nature" (oil/wood panel, 1893) by William Holman Hunt (1827-1910). This portrait, originally of Hunt's 16-year-old daughter Gladys, presents a seated beauty sketching on her red pad in a summer garden, a dog at her feet & a fountain behind her. It features a face repainted, for some unexplained reason, by another artist into that of a more mature woman. It remains an alluring, contemplative composition in which green & pink colors prevail.

* "Roman Widow (Dis Manibus)" (oil/canvas, 1874) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82). My favorite of the entire show, this painting offers a seductive yet aloof blue-eyed redhead (based on Rossetti's favorite model, Alexa Wilding) performing a funerary ritual with zither-like instruments beside her husband's cinerary urn. Gold, pink, auburn & green tones lend the portrait a vibrant sheen & a vitality that belies the morbid subject.

* The small Briar Rose series (oil/canvas, 1871-73), a triptych comprised of: (1) "The Prince Enters the Wood" (2) "The King & His Court" & (3) "The Sleeping Beauty" by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones(1833-98). This rather eerie trio of paintings, executed in Burne-Jones's semi-crude mystical style, presents a variety of figures sleeping in a forest, in a garlanded courtyard & in a bedchamber of slumbering beauties, respectively. Based on the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, as interpreted by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem "Day Dream" (1842), there is a hallucinatory quality to the series.

Asked why he hadn't - like most artists who tackled this popular subject - depicted the awakening of Sleeping Beauty, Burne-Jones replied: "I want it to stop with the princess asleep and to tell no more, to leave all the afterwards to the invention & imagination of people." Good words to live by in this era of comatose imagination.