An amazing dreamcoat at the Royal Academy: the Lloyd Webber collection.

THE discourtesies extended to the collector, Andrew Lloyd Webber, by the London Evening Standard, The Sunday Times and The Guardian, were not only incivil but also irrelevant. I too feel blank about his musical entertainments. That has nothing to do with the pictures which he has bought from the profits of his enterprises. Money could be far worse spent. He has justified his considerable wealth by sharing the pictures it brought him with the public, at short notice and no little trouble to himself, and to the enrichment of the Royal Academy.

It must be conceded that there is little consistency of style or achievement in the exhibition. Lloyd Webber is devoted to Victorian art and cannot resist kitsch so long as it is Victorian kitsch. Among many meritorious pictures there are some which are quite appalling, as well as various tasteless artefacts. They include a bizarre grand piano, not only reconstructed by Philip Webb but in addition decorated by Kate Faulkner with playing-card pips, mottoes and whorls of gilt gesso-work.

Sir John Millais is represented by Chill October, a meticulously positioned landscape worthy of Daubigny or Theodore Rousseau of the Barbizon School. His Huguenot Lovers (a girl pleading with a young man to flee the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and in her ardour pulling him by her scarf with what little strength she has) is deftly composed, the figures slotted into each other in a trim polygon. Elsewhere Millais's story-telling bent becomes ludicrous in such pictures as The Proscribed Royalist, in which a former Cavalier stretches his begrimed head out of a hollow oak-tree to kiss the hand of his lady, who has brought him food. A similar clownish aptness degrades a grave event in William Holman Hunt's Shadow of Death. There a clay-coloured hirsute Jesus, halfway through sawing a plank in Joseph's carpenter's shop, stretches Himself so that He casts a shadow of His crucified form.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti had enough wit and judgement to shun such glib and tasteless visual puns; also to avoid 'platitudes in stained-glass attitudes', as Gilbert put it in one of his libretti. Subtly moving as a poet and translator, Rossetti was far less so as a painter. Self-trained and over-confident, in his earliest pictures he favoured large spongy miasmas of simple colours, either gaudy or dismal. Later, in pursuit of his opiated dreams, he devised cocktails of chloral and colour in the form of his succession of burly Swinburnean women, heavy-tressed and olive-complexioned, their thick jaws jutting from necks coiled like pythons, as in Fiammetta and La Ghirlandata. Finally, although a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, he abandoned the style of Fra Angelico for the distinctly post-Raphaelite Florentine bogus-Mannerism (sometimes contrived, over-ripe and maudlin) of Carlo Dolci and Sassoferrato, as in Blanzifiore and The Damsel of the Sanct Grael.

In a jumble of disparities, it seems best to single out three outstanding Post-Pre-Raphaelite painters: Edward Burne-Jones, James Waterhouse and Atkinson Grimshaw.

Burne-Jones's incompatibility with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood may be discerned in two pictures in the exhibition: Rossetti's Fiammetta, 'a hot wench in flaming taffeta', parts two boughs of improbable apple-blossom and peers through them with an unfocused gape. In Burne-Jones's Music two girls, intent on their duo of voice and viola, interact among limpid orchard-colours. As in Mantegna, whom he admired, Burne-Jones's drawing and coloration are sharp and pellucid. He was as keen at first on the Grail legend and knights in armour as any Pre-Raphaelite, but depicted the Quest for the Grail with a stricter antiquarian accuracy. Max Beerbohm once caricatured the Greek scholar, Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, among a throng of Pre-Raphaelites who were painting frescoes: Jowett asks them what the knights would do with the Grail when they found it. Burne-Jones would have felt the weight of Jowett's sarcasm.

Having done well in Classics at his school in Birmingham, the Welshman Burne-Jones studied the subject at Exeter College, Oxford, for a year before leaving in 1855 to join his friends Rossetti and Morris as an artist. His gradual detachment from the Pre-Raphaelites began in the early 1860s when, in spite of Rossetti's advice, he spent some years in the close study of classical art. As a result he undertook a sequence of paintings, intermittently continued, of the story of Cupid and Psyche, partly based on Morris's Earthly Paradise, but with further details from the original narrative in Apuleius's Golden Ass. Apuleius's exotic vocabulary creates difficulties for an apprentice Latinist. Burne-Jones probably relied on William Aldlington's ribald sixteenth-century version (which, in expurgated form, still accompanies the Latin text in the Loeb edition of Apuleius), or on Mary Tighe's more maidenly translation, in Spenserian stanzas, which Keats had drawn upon in three of his most splendid odes. Walter Pater's supreme rendering, incorporated in Marius the Epicurean, had yet to appear and, indeed, may well have been tinged by Burne-Jones's visions.

The gist of the tale is that Psyche survives the cruelties of Venus, jealous of her beauty, in order to marry her son Cupid. The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche is the subject of two of the most accomplished pictures in Europe: a fresco by Giulio Romano in the Ducal Palace at Mantua, and a panel by Joachim Wtewael in the London National Gallery. The picture in the Lloyd Webber Collection from Burne-Jone's history of Psyche is Psyche and Zephyrus. Zephyrus, Cupid's go-between, rescues Psyche from a crag, on which she has been exposed, by wafting her dreamily down the precipice to Cupid's Palace. In her limp reverie she places her trusting bare feet on his as they embark, above birds in flight, on the entranced air. He carries her without much modesty, supporting her upper torso and her rear, as one should carry a cat.

Burne-Jones's Pygmalion sequence, four pictures which took him two years, was commissioned by Euphrosyne Cassavetti, a Greek art-lover who had settled in London. She added to her patronage by offering her daughter Maria Zambaco, to pose as Galatea ('milk-white'), the statue which came to life. Maria Zambaco, and her memory, remained his favourite model for the rest of his artistic career.

Burne-Jones transfers the myth, taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses, to a late medieval town. The sculptor Pygmalion plies his art in dark-panelled rooms with a skewed oak staircase. Through arched doors and lead-framed casements appear bridged lanes and castellated walls. Pygmalion, repelled by the licentiousness of the women of his native Cyprus, longed for purer femininity. After much thought he captured his ideal in an ivory image. He successfully pleaded with the goddess of love to bring the image to life, and so fell in love with his own handiwork. Under each of the four pictures Burne-Jones inscribed one line of a jingle:

                               The heart desires
                               The hand refrains
                               The godhead fires
                               The soul attains.

Burne Jones's rough quatrain also portrays the stages of artistic creation.

The heart desires. Seeking to enhance reality, Pygmalion turns his back on the graceless women of Cyprus and reviews various ideal forms and attitudes: painted in grisaille, to locate them in the shadows of the artist's incipient thoughts as they struggle towards the light of realisation. The hand refrains. The artist has accomplished what he can do by the power of his technique, but that is not enough. The godhead inspires. At last inspiration, 'the divine madness', here represented by Venus, animates the calculated effect. As Plato says in his Phaedrus, 'He who without the Muses' madness in his soul comes knocking on the door of poetry, and thinks that skill alone will enable him to become a poet, finds that the poetry he composes in sober thought is outdone by the poetry of the possessed'. The soul attains. At last the artist embodies his ideal, and is so enamoured with his own creation, as Turner was with Dido Building Carthage, that he is unwilling to part with it in his lifetime. In addition the pictures record Burne-Jones's infatuation with Maria Zambaco since, in the first of his many double portraits of her, she poses for both Galatea and Venus, who animates her.

Burne-Jones's sturdy-limbed inamorata plays Venus again in The Mirror of Venus. The goddess, clad in a diaphanous robe, overawes the medieval demoiselles who have gathered to admire their reflections in a mountain pool. Not long afterwards Maria Zambaco went on to pose for his pair of watercolours, Vesper and Night. With her surprised eyes and dropped underlip, as if startled from a reverie, she perches on her bare toes as Vesper, and flicks up the hem of her dragonfly-blue chiton, to become airborne in the violet dusk. Burne-Jones added bookbinder's gilt to her red-gold hair, since watercolour was not vivid enough for her cropped but light-scattering tresses. She vaguely points downwards, as if alerting the darkening world to imminent nightfall. As Night itself she assumes a robe the hue of a starlit cloud. Her hands waft over the swimming skyscape like those of Galatea awakened by Venus in the Pygmalion sequence.

Among the revelations of the exhibition is Burne-Jones's gift for the portrayal of children, his fellow daydreamers: the featherlight gloss of the infant Dorothy Mattersdorf's hair, her pensive eyes and the delicate freshness of her skin; the tenebrous fragility of Amy Gaskell as she trembles on the verge of womanhood. One wonders whether he fathered his daughter Margaret or simply dreamed up this seraph with a tip-tilted nose as he portrayed her in Flamma Vestalis. Her bland cheeks, long eyes and peach-plump hands may in part have defined the way John Waterhouse chose and perceived the seemingly unchanging model of his pictures.

Students interested in the life of the reclusive Waterhouse, well known only for the popularity of postcards and prints of his works, have spent many hours in their efforts to trace this model, who appears in over sixty pictures he painted from 1889 to 1917, the last twenty-eight years of his life; as repeatedly as Marthe Bonnard in her husband's paintings. Little is gained by such research, more biographical than aesthetic, except some interesting gossip. The model may have been Muriel Forster from Chingford, plus Waterhouse's recollection of her, or she may have been another hired model, or even a figure of fantasy based on several models, with large bright eyes, high cheekbones, an opulent mouth, and the body as fluent as the becks, rills, runnels and weirs that pervade Waterhouse's work. She has the elfin air of a creature from the romances of chivalry:

                    Of faery damsels met in forests wide
                    By knights of Logres, or of Lyonesse.

Her constant presence in Waterhouse's pictures, so that she could almost be regarded as his collaborator, makes them uniform, but not monotonous, since there is always a novel dexterity of line and grace of colour to be admired. Waterhouse often casts her in mischievous roles: as a predatory naiad in Hylas at Manchester Art Gallery; as a mermaid in an exquisite painting now in the cellars of the Millbank Tate Gallery; and, in the Lloyd Webber Collection, as The Flower Picker, Pandora, and one of The Danaides. The flower-picker leans over a fence to steal blossoms from somebody else's hedgerow. Pandora tentatively pries under the lid, so slightly lifted, of her box; merely wanting to inform herself, meaning no harm, just disliking to be kept out of a secret. As one of the artist's dutiful Victorian Danaides, condemned in the underworld to pour water forever into a leaking tank, she carefully and earnestly, without regret, pursues her endless task. She also enacts the more sympathetic parts of Ophelia and Tennyson's Lady Clare. Ophelia, strewn with bedraggled flowers, pauses in her wild-eyed rush before plunging into the stream. In accord with Tennyson's antiquarian ballad, Lady Clare, pallidly honest, returns her aristocratic suitor's gift when she discovers that she is, after all, of lowly birth; although as she tells him the story she plays with the buckle of her belt. Her lover, as true to her as she is truthful to him, merrily replies:

                       We two shall wed tomorrow morn,
                       And you shall still be Lady Clare.

There is little of what Gilbert mocked as 'ultra-poetical, super-aesthetical' about the paintings of Atkinson Grimshaw, although by the power of his uncontrived imagination he was able to transfigure landscape into spellbinding visual poetry. He was born to every discouragement in Leeds (the Coketown of Dicken's Hard Times) in 1836. His fiercely nonconformist parents, small shopkeepers, brutally opposed and curbed his bent for painting. At the early age of twenty-two he married a local girl, who was his first supporter as an artist. She would bear him fifteen children, nine of whom died in infancy. Impelled by a few paintings by him which made their way into such galleries and exhibitions as he could find in Leeds, he resigned from his post as a railway clerk there. He sold his pictures at bazaars in Leeds Town Hall, exhibited at the Leeds Literary and Philosophical Society, and found a patron in a local bookseller who stipulated that he should not paint on the Sabbath.

With a Victorian zeal for self-improvement he read the poets of his time. One of his earliest paintings was of snowdrops, with a title derived from Tennyson, Fair Maids of February: a close botanical rendering that John Ruskin would have approved of, with the blurred green edges of the petals and the surrounding withered bracken and broken twigs sharply observed; but trifling compared to the two landscapes of the same decade: Lake Buttermere (1865) and Ghyll Beck (1867). Within walking distance, by strenuous Victorian standards, of industrial cities unspoilt natural scenery could still be found.

Observed from a height above, a track swerves through twisting contours and around a heather-tufted spur down to a lake mottled by the reflections of green and purple fells. Sheep nibble at a stony pasture moulded by outcrops of rock. Across Lake Buttermere firs mount a ridge, like the stretched vanguard of an army. From the dark geometrical precision of its bridge, Ghyll Beck lopes downhill in long slants of water pelting spindrift spray and flooding, pure white, across the wide flat stones at the base of the waterfall. The tangled curves of its foam are balanced by the stark verticals of birch and ash, leafless in early spring. The banks are steep slides of rocks and mossy roots, pocketed with pitted red sand, driftgrass and slack alluvial soil, and stippled with a scatter of primroses and heaped heather.

The well-deserved fame of Grimshaw's early landscapes now became more than local. By 1875 he had a London dealer and his work was accepted by the Royal Academy. Unfortunately, by frequenting the galleries and artistic circles of London, he deviated into some ill-judged imitations. His admiration of Tissot's scenes of pseudo-high life in a quasi-fashionable demi-monde led to Grimshaw's disastrous domestic scenes, Il Penseroso and Dulce Domum among them, in which he ingenuously advertised his purchase of a manor-house near Leeds and his lease of a large villa in Scarborough. The reputation of Millais, particularly for his Tennysonian pastiches, beguiled Grimshaw into two foolish versions of The Lady of Shalott. Alma-Tadema's faked classicism generated Grimshaw's wholly inept Two Thousand Years Ago (Private Collection). In his awed provincialism Grimshaw failed to realise that as a painter he could outdo all three so long as he kept to his own landscapes and townscapes. Grimshaw gradually fretted away the cord that bound him to the artistic dandies of the Parish of St James, Piccadilly, and regained his freedom on the Yorkshire heights, on the wharves of Liverpool and Whitby, and in the gas-lit streets of London remote from the West End.

His special felicity was in the depiction of moonlight, mist-gleam and rainshine, often in combination, on parkland, ship-rigged harbours and lamp-lit city streets. In his painting of the waterfront of Liverpool, masts and tenements rise together into the rain that washes the light into the flowing streets. The view from his Cornhill (1885) is towards Cheapside, with the moonlight blue as it slides round the shadows of the Mansion House. The foggy ghost of St Paul's rears up behind the Gothic Revival jeweller's shop (recently and regrettably pulled down) latticed with topaz gaslight that catches in its glow the wet street and the majestic iron wheels of the horse-drawn cabs.

It is amusing that when Grimshaw was asked to create three pictures to promote Roundhay Park, recently acquired as public gardens by the Leeds Corporation, he painted them by moonlight, when the estate would have been closed, and in winter when they would not be much visited. Wimbledon Park and Stapleton Park recapture his affectionate memories of the leaf-puddled tracks, the picket fences and rain-mottled walls of the Roundhay estate. Those memories persist in his mysteriously entitled Sixty Years Ago, with its luminous mist and rain, its loamy ruts and gaunt dark trees. Grimshaw merits comparison with more august masters than Tissot, Millais and Alma-Tadema. In his command of sunlight infused with weather this underestimated painter comes close to the young Turner. In his evocation of streetlight he is surpassed only by Paul Delvaux. In capturing the effects of moonlight he vies with Caspar David Friedrich.

As visitors wander through the exhibition's motley assemblage of pictures and artefacts, pausing or hurrying on as they please, they are bound to find enough other works of interest to beguile them pleasantly through a long morning or afternoon.

The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection is at the Royal Academy until 12 December, from 10.00 to 18.00 Saturday to Thursday and 10.00 to 22.00 Friday. Admission costs [pounds sterling]9, with concessions. For further information telephone [phone] or <www.royalacademy.org.uk>.