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The Pre-Raphaelites: A Brotherhood of Painters and Poets

“Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape is delineated with the minutest care, and coloured with an exactness almost botanical.” — William Michael Rossetti, defending the Brotherhood, 1851

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a small group of English painters, poets, and critics who, beginning in 1848, set out to reform English art by returning to the detailed naturalism, bright color, and spiritual seriousness of European painting before Raphael. Within a few years the original brotherhood had been joined by a wider circle of associates and followers, and the Pre-Raphaelite movement became one of the most influential artistic currents of the later nineteenth century, shaping the Aesthetic movement, the Arts and Crafts movement, the Art Nouveau, the Symbolist painters, and many twentieth-century artists.

The Founding of the Brotherhood

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848 by three young London art students — Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais — together with four other associates, including the sculptor Thomas Woolner and the critic F.G. Stephens. The group was reacting against what they saw as the empty academic conventions of the Royal Academy and the slick, dark, “brown sauce” manner that dominated English academic painting. They looked back to the art of the late medieval and early Renaissance periods — to the work of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Van Eyck, Memling, and Bellini — for a model of intense naturalism, brilliant color, and spiritual seriousness.

The Brotherhood signed their early pictures with the monogram “PRB” and published a short-lived journal, The Germ (1850), which carried their manifestos and their first poems. By the mid-1850s the movement had begun to attract both fierce criticism and enthusiastic supporters, including the great critic John Ruskin, who became its most powerful defender.

The Pre-Raphaelite Principles

The Pre-Raphaelite principles, as they emerged in the manifestos of The Germ and in Ruskin’s writings, included:

Truth to nature — minute, detailed, faithful observation of the natural world, including its imperfect, ordinary, and ugly aspects.
Bright color and clear light — the use of pure pigment and the rejection of the dark, polished conventions of the academic style.
Serious subject matter — religious, literary, moral, and historical subjects treated with the same seriousness that medieval and early Renaissance artists had given them.
Anti-academic stance — rejection of the Royal Academy hierarchy and the “machinery” of art education.
The unity of art and poetry — the conviction that painting and poetry were sister arts, and that the painter should be as cultivated in literature as the poet in visual art.

The Major Pre-Raphaelite Painters

The leading figures of the movement include:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) — painter, poet, and the central figure of the early Brotherhood. His paintings — The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849), Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850), Beata Beatrix (c. 1864–70) — combined Pre-Raphaelite detail with a haunting, sensuous, otherworldly quality. His poetry — The Blessed Damozel, the House of Life sonnet sequence — was among the most influential in Victorian England.
William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) — the most earnest and the most traveled of the original Brotherhood. His paintings — The Light of the World (1851–53), The Scapegoat (1854–55), The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1854–60) — combined Pre-Raphaelite detail with religious seriousness, ethnographical precision, and the new “Oriental” subject matter of the later nineteenth century.
John Everett Millais (1829–1896) — the most technically brilliant painter of the Brotherhood, who eventually broke with Pre-Raphaelite principles to become a celebrated society portraitist and the most successful English painter of his generation. His early masterpieces — Ophelia (1851–52), Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50), Mariana (1851) — are among the most important Pre-Raphaelite works.
Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893) — not technically a member of the Brotherhood but closely associated with it, the author of The Last of England (1852–55), Work (1852–65), and a great cycle of murals for Manchester Town Hall.
Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898) — Rossetti’s most important follower, the leading figure of the “second wave” of Pre-Raphaelitism. His paintings — The Mirror of Venus, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, the Briar Rose series — combined Pre-Raphaelite detail with a dreamlike, symbolist, almost medievalist sensibility.
William Morris (1834–1896) — Rossetti’s friend and Burne-Jones’s collaborator, founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, the firm of Morris & Co., the Kelmscott Press, and the Socialist League. Morris’s decorative art, his literary work (especially the prose romances of the 1890s), and his political writings all grew out of the Pre-Raphaelite inspiration.
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) — the major Pre-Raphaelite poet, author of Atalanta in Calydon (1865), Poems and Ballads (1866), and Songs before Sunrise (1871).
Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) — Dante Gabriel’s sister, the most famous woman poet of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, author of Goblin Market (1862) and the devotional sonnets.
Arthur Hughes, Walter Howell Deverell, John Brett, and others — important painters of the movement.

The “Second Wave” and the Aesthetic Movement

By the 1860s the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had effectively dissolved, but the movement continued in new forms. Rossetti’s later work, with its sensuous, dreamy, “stunner” images of women, helped give birth to the Aesthetic movement, the cult of “art for art’s sake” that dominated the London art world of the 1860s and 1870s. Burne-Jones became the most influential painter of the later Victorian period, his dreamlike figures and medievalist imagery shaping the look of late Victorian art. The partnership of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Morris — through the firm of Morris & Co., the Kelmscott Press, and a vast range of decorative projects — created a new model of the artist as designer and craftsman that would have enormous influence on the Arts and Crafts movement and, eventually, on the Bauhaus and the modern design tradition.

The Influence of the Pre-Raphaelites

The influence of the Pre-Raphaelites on later art is difficult to overstate. The Aesthetic movement, the Arts and Crafts movement, the Symbolist painters, the Art Nouveau, the Vienna Secession, the early twentieth-century revival of medieval and gothic art, the design tradition that runs from William Morris through the Bauhaus to contemporary design — all of these are, in important ways, descendants of the Pre-Raphaelite revolution. The major collections of Pre-Raphaelite art — the Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Delaware Art Museum in the United States — are still among the most-visited art collections in the world.