The Pre-Raphaelites: English Art before Raphael

The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of British artists who in 1848 formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They wanted to return to the detailed, honest and colourful art that existed before Raphael, and they preferred careful study of nature, medieval and literary subjects, and serious religious and moral themes.

Facts

The Brotherhood of 1848

In the autumn of 1848 three young students at the Royal Academy in London, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, formed a secret society that they called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a brotherhood with four other members. They thought the academy’s art, with its dark tones and theatrical poses, had gone wrong since the time of Raphael, and they wanted to return to earlier art, in which every leaf and every fabric was painted with care.

The name was a provocation. Raphael was the academy’s hero, and to call oneself a Pre-Raphaelite meant that one wanted to go back to the early Italian painters before him. The movement quickly gained the support of the critic John Ruskin, who urged painters to be true to nature.

Truth to nature

The Pre-Raphaelites studied plants, faces and clothing with almost scientific accuracy. Millais painted Ophelia in 1851–1852 by a river in Surrey, and the model, Elizabeth Siddal, had to lie in a bath of warm water in the studio, according to tradition for so long that she fell ill. The picture shows Shakespeare’s drowning Ophelia surrounded by exactly painted flowers, each with its own symbolism.

The colours are clear and bright. One of the painters’ tricks was to paint on a wet white ground that shone through the colour. Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World, with Christ knocking at an overgrown door, is an example of their religious seriousness, and Ford Madox Brown depicted the whole of Victorian society around roadworks in Hampstead in Work, 1852–1865.

Rossetti, Burne-Jones and the medieval dream

In the 1850s Rossetti moved away from exact observation towards sensual, poetic pictures of women with heavy masses of hair, often with his muse Jane Morris or Elizabeth Siddal as model. Beata Beatrix, begun after Siddal’s death in 1862, is a melancholy memorial work. Rossetti was also a poet, and he illustrated his own poems.

Edward Burne-Jones took over the medieval dream in a softer, more decorative key, and John William Waterhouse painted much later, in 1888, The Lady of Shalott, one of the most reproduced Victorian pictures. Tennyson’s poem became a favourite source, as did the legends of King Arthur and Dante. Burne-Jones’s art influenced the Symbolists on the Continent.

From painting to craft

The movement’s ideas became larger than painting. William Morris was a friend of Burne-Jones and Rossetti, and his wallpapers and fabrics, such as Strawberry Thief, build on the same delight in nature, the Middle Ages and exactness. Morris’s daughter May Morris and artists such as William De Morgan carried the idea on. The movement became part of Arts and Crafts; read the guide to Arts and Crafts and see the Morris chair and Red House in the design section.

The Pre-Raphaelites matter because they were one of the first groups to organise against the art establishment, and because they showed how painting, design and literature could work together. Read about the period under Victorian art and compare Romanticism, between which they are often forgotten.

How to recognise it

Exercise

What does the name Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood mean?