Pre-Raphaelitism in Painting: The Movement That Defied Convention
In the autumn of 1848, a handful of students from the Royal Academy in London met in secret and decided that art had been going wrong for more than three centuries. The culprit, they said, was Raphael, or rather the polished, idealised manner that the academies had built on his example. William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The name sounded backward-looking. What they painted was brighter, sharper and more shocking than anything else on the walls of Victorian London.
Movement: Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB)
Founded: London, 1848
Principal members: William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Champion: the critic John Ruskin
Second phase: from around 1860, with Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris
Where to see it: Tate Britain, London; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
A secret brotherhood
The Brotherhood had seven members: the three painters, the painter James Collinson, the sculptor Thomas Woolner, the critic Frederic George Stephens and Rossetti’s brother, William Michael Rossetti, who kept its journal. Hunt and Millais were the most gifted technicians; Rossetti, a poet as much as a painter, brought ideas and literary passion. According to Tate, they rejected the Royal Academy’s promotion of the ideal, as exemplified in the work of Raphael, and they despised the trivial anecdotes that filled so many Victorian exhibitions. Instead they wanted serious subjects treated with the greatest possible realism.
Their models were the painters who came before the High Renaissance: the early Italians and the Flemish masters of the fifteenth century, artists like Jan van Eyck, whose Arnolfini Portrait had entered the National Gallery in London only a few years earlier. In those pictures the young painters found sincerity, clear colour and loving attention to every detail.
Truth to nature
The Brotherhood took its method from the writer John Ruskin, who urged artists to “go to nature” and record it faithfully. They painted outdoors for weeks at a time, in front of the real plants, walls and rivers, and they built up their colours in thin layers over a white ground, which made them glow with an almost enamel-like brightness. The result is famous in Millais’s Ophelia: every flower, nettle and willow leaf on the riverbank is painted with the same care as the drowning girl’s face.
This democracy of detail was part of the provocation. In academic painting, the hero came first and the background was merely suggested. The Pre-Raphaelites gave a weed the same dignity as a saint, and many critics found the effect harsh, crowded and even ugly.
Scandal and defence
The first works signed with the mysterious initials “PRB” appeared in 1849: Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Millais’s Isabella, a scene from a poem by Keats. When the meaning of the initials leaked out, the reaction turned hostile. In 1850 Millais exhibited Christ in the House of His Parents, which showed the Holy Family as ordinary working people in a cluttered carpenter’s shop, with dirty fingernails and bare floorboards. Charles Dickens attacked it furiously in his magazine Household Words, and many found it close to blasphemy.
The tide turned in 1851, when Ruskin wrote to The Times in their defence, praising their truth and seriousness. Within a few years the group’s paintings were selling well. The Brotherhood itself, however, did not last: its members went their own ways in the early 1850s, and Millais was elected to the very Royal Academy they had defied.
The second wave
As Tate explains, a second phase of the movement emerged around 1860, inspired above all by Rossetti. Its leading figures were Rossetti himself, the painter Edward Burne-Jones and the designer William Morris. The sharp realism of the early years gave way to dreamy, sensual images of women drawn from legend and poetry, such as Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, Lady Lilith and Proserpine, and Burne-Jones’s languid Mirror of Venus. This later Pre-Raphaelitism fed directly into Symbolism and, through Morris, into the Arts and Crafts movement.
The style also lived on in younger painters. John William Waterhouse, born in 1849, a year after the Brotherhood was founded, took up its love of Arthurian legend and doomed heroines in works such as The Lady of Shalott (1888) and The Magic Circle. Read our guide to Waterhouse’s women who break the rule, or see how John Collier’s Lilith and Edmund Blair Leighton’s God Speed carried the same romantic medievalism into the twentieth century.
Pre-Raphaelite paintings in our print shop
All of these paintings are in the public domain, and each is available as a museum-quality print, canvas or poster.
OpheliaMillais, 1851–52
The Girlhood of Mary VirginRossetti, 1849
IsabellaMillais, 1849
Christ in the House of His ParentsMillais, 1849–50
Beata BeatrixRossetti, c. 1864
ProserpineRossetti, 1874
The Mirror of VenusBurne-Jones, 1877
The Lady of ShalottWaterhouse, 1888
See Millais’s Ophelia framed on your wall: a museum-quality print, canvas or poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
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Where can you see Pre-Raphaelite paintings?
The largest collection is at Tate Britain in London, home to Ophelia, Christ in the House of His Parents, Beata Beatrix, Proserpine and Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott. Our guide to the paintings you can see in London has practical tips for a visit. You can also browse more nineteenth-century art by museum and period in Explore Art.
Watch the video essay (in Spanish) on @SapiensVerbum on YouTube.
Sources
Tate, Art Term “Pre-Raphaelite”; Tate, collection records for the works cited; Wikipedia, “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood”.
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