The touches of naturalism, including the photography—like facial expressions—as much as the smudged classicism-only emphasise the awkward artificiality of the more complex dramatic pictures. So often they seem like snapshots of a costume rehearsal for a historical play, with the actors caught mid-thought, pondering their own performances. The painters were terribly literal-minded; they must have had such limited confidence in interpretative depiction, because they hardly ever went beyond simply imagining what the represented episode or event could have looked like.

Occasionally, in less ambitious works such as Alma-Tadema's Returning Home from Market, this imagining could be successful, and quite convincing, and even charming—the artist's boyish enthusiasm for everything to do with ancient Rome is evident, and his joyful addition of the "SALVE" mosaic in the open doorway gives us the sense of how he would have loved to have been welcomed across that threshold. No great drama is illustrated, and the faces do not seem so incongruous—indeed, the faces are rather well cast. The picture has its appeal as a scene of everyday ancient Roman life. But this is an artwork that aspires to not much more than archaeological reconstruction.

Still, there really is something fresh about this early work—and it does not strike us as kitsch because kitsch is always sickly. The qualities of Alma-Tadema's painting are only descriptive, but he described every detail carefully, without smudging around his subject. Kitsch is, in part, a style, and that is how we learn to recognise it; and kitsch involves a technical error as well as a conceptual error: when a painter smudges around the eyes, his paint is as indistinct as his thought; and then he brings his paint into focus just where he shouldn't, in meaningless incidentals. He fills in and shows off, distractingly, and he smudges out because for him art is all effect and no cause.

However, kitsch comes in varied concentrations; and even the kitschiest of these Victorian paintings are not all or only kitsch. If we dismiss them too quickly with ‘kitsch', we are likely not to notice how surprisingly innovative they sometimes were. The innovation comes from an especially acute sort of observation, and it is to be found right there in those problematic naturalistic touches.  While the painters' doggedness dulled the drama in their subject-matter, it also happened to give their work a new intensity, and even a new character. The lichen-covered rock-face that Poynter set behind Andromeda is far more interesting as painting, and as art, than the twisted cliché of Andromeda herself. The Pre-Raphaelite movement—and the best part of its legacy—now seems as notable for its insistence on the optical fact as for its stylistic arguments. Pre-Raphaelite painters, no less than the Impressionists, believed that their eyes alone would suffice in art, that beauty lay in "truth to nature". As they looked so inquisitively at nature, they made the same discoveries as the Impressionists—they too went back to painting on white grounds; they too heightened the colour key and narrowed the tonal range so as to depict full sunlight; and they too brightened their shadows and filled them with rich complementary colours. It was not just Poynter; so many Victorian painters excelled themselves in the backgrounds—their conceptions were too often awkward and artificial, but when they looked at nature they could be more natural. Avant-garde and kitsch may not be as divergent as they once seemed—does Albert Joseph Moore's pastel, A Bathing Place, really seem so far away from Renoir's pastels? And is the sentiment in it really so different from that in Monet's Woman with a Parasol? The Impressionists were affected by photography too, however vehement they were in their painterliness.