Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB). The name adopted in 1848 by a group of young English artists who shared a dismay at what they considered the moribund state of British painting and hoped to recapture the sincerity and simplicity of early Italian art (i.e. before the time of Raphael, whom they saw as the fountainhead of academism). The nucleus of the group was formed by three fellow students at the Royal Academy— William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (to whom, son of an Italian ex-revolutionary, the sealing of the group into a secret Brotherhood was due). The other four original brethren were the painter James Collinson, the sculptor Thomas Woolner, and the art critics W. M. Rossetti (1829–1919) and F. G. Stephens (1828–1907). Ford Madox Brown was closely allied with them, though not at any time a member of the Brotherhood. The movement had a strong literary flavour from the start, and the members published a short-lived journal called the Germ (4 issues, 1850); Rossetti was distinguished as a poet as well as a painter. His brother defined the aims of the Brotherhood as follows: ‘(1) To have genuine ideas to express; (2) to study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them; (3) to sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote; and (4) and most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.’ Their desire for fidelity to nature was expressed through detailed, rather literal-minded observation of flora, etc., and the use of a clear, bright, sharp-focus technique; and their moral seriousness is seen in their choice of religious or other uplifting themes. The kind of pictures they hated were academic ‘machines’ and trivial genre scenes.

The initials PRB were first used on Rossetti's picture The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (Tate, London), exhibited in 1849, and were adopted by the other members of the Brotherhood. When their meaning became known in 1850 the group was subjected to furious criticism and abuse. Charles Dickens led the attack in his periodical Household Words, calling Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50, Tate) ‘mean, odious, revolting and repulsive’ (later he became a friend of Millais). Dickens was outraged by the implied rejection of Raphael (still unquestioningly thought of by many critics as the greatest painter who ever lived), and he regarded the claim to go behind Raphael as an anti-progressive reversion to primitivism and ugliness. The fortunes of the Pre-Raphaelites improved greatly after they were publicly defended by Ruskin in 1851, and they attracted numerous followers. These included John Brett, Charles Allston Collins, Walter Howell Deverell, Augustus Egg, Arthur Hughes, Henry Wallis, and two artists who are each remembered for only a single Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece— Henry Alexander Bowler (1824–1903), painter of The Doubt: ‘Can These Dry Bones Live?’ (1855, Tate), and William Shakespeare Burton (1824–1916), painter of The Wounded Cavalier (1856, Guildhall AG, London).

By 1853, however, the Brotherhood itself had virtually dissolved. Apart from their youthful revolutionary spirit (they were very young in 1848) and their romantic if uninformed medievalism, the prime movers had little in common as artists and they went their separate ways. Of the original members only Hunt remained true to PRB doctrines. Millais adopted a much looser style and went on to become the most popular and successful painter of the day. Curiously, however, it was Rossetti, the least committed to PRB ideals (he never cultivated painstaking detail), who continued the name. Although his later work, made up principally of languorous depictions of femmes fatales, is entirely different from his early Pre-Raphaelite pictures, the name stuck to him and to his followers. Thus in the popular imagination the term ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ conjures up pictures of medieval romance, and ironically a movement that began as a rebellion against artificiality and sentimentality is now itself identified with a kind of escapism. This second wave of pseudo-medieval Pre-Raphaelitism had its roots in the decoration of the newly built Oxford Union Society debating hall (now the Old Library) with scenes from Arthurian legend (1857), a scheme in which Rossetti was joined by Burne-Jones, William Morris, Val Prinsep (1838–1904), and other artists (the paintings, in distemper, were technically unsound and have faded badly). Rossetti's influence endured after his death and the smouldering temptresses he painted, together with the more pallid and ethereal beauties of Burne-Jones, were much imitated at the turn of the century, when they were part of the taste for Symbolism.

The Pre-Raphaelite tradition was continued well into the 20th century in the work of artists such as Evelyn De Morgan, Sidney Harold Meteyard (1868–1947), John Byam Shaw (1872–1919), and John Melhuish Strudwick (1849–1937). After the First World War, however, work in this style was increasingly considered old-fashioned, and the reputations of the original Pre-Raphaelites slumped. In 1948 the centenary of the founding of the PRB was marked by several exhibitions and the publication of a substantial book (Pre-Raphaelite Painters by Robin Ironside and John Gere), but it was not until the 1960s that there was a general revival of interest in the subject.