The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, later simply the Pre-Raphaelites, was a group of young English artists founded in London in 1848 to renew painting through truth to nature and the sincerity of art before Raphael. Their pictures glow with clear, jewel-bright color, show every leaf and fold in sharp focus and treat medieval, literary and biblical subjects charged with symbolism. The name was aimed at the Royal Academy. They blamed its teaching on Raphael’s elegant classical poses and on the murky manner of its first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, whom they nicknamed Sir Sloshua.
The Brotherhood was formed in Millais’s parents’ house in Gower Street around three young painters, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. By the autumn of 1848 the painters James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens, the critic William Michael Rossetti and the sculptor Thomas Woolner had joined, making seven members in a fellowship partly modeled on the German Nazarenes. They resolved to have genuine ideas, to study nature closely, to value what was direct and heartfelt in earlier art and to make thoroughly good work. Their first pictures, shown in 1849, carried the secret initials PRB, and in 1850 they published four issues of a magazine, The Germ.
Hunt and Millais laid thin glazes over a wet white ground so that the color kept a jewel-like brightness, in deliberate contrast to the bitumen-darkened browns of earlier British painting. They painted landscape backgrounds outdoors, plant by plant. For Ophelia (1851-1852, Tate Britain), Millais spent months in 1851 painting a riverbank in Surrey, then posed Elizabeth Siddal in a bathtub in his London studio for the drowning figure. Millais’s Isabella (1848-1849, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), from a poem by Keats, and Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1849-1850, Tate Britain), with its white room and hesitant young Virgin, show the pale, flat clarity of the early style.
Their candor provoked an outcry. Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents (1849-1850, Tate Britain), showing the Holy Family in a cluttered carpenter’s shop, was condemned as blasphemous, and Charles Dickens found its Virgin ugly and its figures common. In 1851, after The Times attacked the group, the critic John Ruskin defended them in letters to the same paper. James Collinson had already resigned over the religious controversy, and by 1853 the Brotherhood had dissolved. That year Millais, painting Ruskin’s portrait in Scotland, fell in love with Ruskin’s wife, Effie Gray; after her marriage was annulled, she married Millais in 1855.
The members then went separate ways. Hunt stayed truest to the program: The Light of the World (1851-1853, Keble College, Oxford) shows Christ knocking at an overgrown door by lantern light, and from 1854 he traveled to Egypt and the Holy Land to paint biblical scenes on the spot, including The Scapegoat (1854-1856, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight) by the Dead Sea. Millais adopted a broader, looser style and in 1896 became president of the Royal Academy. Ford Madox Brown, an older ally who never joined, painted emigrants leaving England in The Last of England (1852-1855, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery) and laborers digging a London street in Work (1852-1865, Manchester Art Gallery).
Rossetti led a second, dreamier phase. After the death in 1862 of Elizabeth Siddal, by then his wife, he painted her as Dante’s Beatrice in Beata Beatrix (about 1864-1870, Tate Britain), and later Jane Morris became the model for brooding half-length figures such as Proserpine (1874, Tate Britain). From 1857 he painted Arthurian murals in the Oxford Union with William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. In 1861 Morris founded a design firm with Rossetti, Brown and Burne-Jones among the partners, the root of the Arts and Crafts movement. Burne-Jones’s King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1884, Tate Britain) and John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott (1888, Tate Britain) carried the style to the end of the century.
Rossetti came to be seen as a forerunner of Symbolism, Gustave Moreau was among the painters the group influenced, and Burne-Jones’s line shaped the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. After the First World War the Pre-Raphaelites were dismissed as sentimental and literary, but a revival from the 1960s culminated in a large exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London in 1984. The main collections are at Tate Britain, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery and the Lady Lever and Walker galleries near Liverpool, and abroad at the Delaware Art Museum and the Art Gallery of South Australia.
