Pre-Raphaelites

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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.

Pre-Raphaelites , brotherhood of English painters and poets formed in 1848 in protest against the low standards of British art. The principal founders were D. G. Rossetti , W. Holman Hunt , and John Millais . In poetry as well as painting, the Pre-Raphaelites turned away from the growing materialism of industrialized England. They sought refuge, through literary symbolism and imagery, in the beauty and comparative simplicity of the medieval world. In the works of the Italian painters prior to Raphael, they found a happy innocence of style that they tried to imitate. Influenced by the Nazarenes , a similar group of German painters founded in Rome in 1810, the Pre-Raphaelites declared themselves devotees of nature and truth. In the early 1850s their works were violently criticized, first by Charles Dickens, as being vulgar and ugly. They were defended by John Ruskin and attracted numerous followers, among whom were Edward Burne-Jones , G. F. Watts , and William Morris , but the group disbanded after 1853 and the movement died out before the end of the century. The paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites are characteristically nostalgic in tone and bright in color. Despite their predilection for simplicity, they were highly meticulous in detail and mannered in style. Eventually their painting became as artificial as the historical painting they had organized to protest. There is a fine collection of Pre-Raphaelite works at the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, Del.

Bibliography: See J. D. Hunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination (1969); J. Nicoll, The Pre-Raphaelites (1970); L. Stevenson, The Pre-Raphaelite Poets (1972); J. Sambrook, ed., Pre-Raphaelitism: A Collection of Critical Essays (1976); T. Hilton, Pre-Raphaelites (1985); J. Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Women: Images of Femininity (1988).

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of artists, poets, and critics—John Everett Millais, D. G. Rossetti, W. Holman Hunt, W. M. Rossetti, T. Woolner, Frederic George Stephens (1828–1907), and James Collinson (1825–81)—who first met as a group, led by the first three, in 1848. The initials ‘P.R.B.’ first appeared on their work in the RA exhibition of 1849. As its periodical the Germ (1850) suggests, the movement was strongly literary, and some of its most striking paintings were inspired by Keats (see Millais's Isabella), Dante, Shakespeare, and Tennyson. Common aspirations of the group included fidelity to nature (manifested in clarity, brightness, detailed first-hand observation of flora, etc.), and moral seriousness, in some expressed in religious themes or symbolic mystical iconography. Many of the subjects were medieval as well as literary, and the movement (much influenced by Ruskin, who became its champion) saw itself in part as a revolt against the ugliness of modern life and dress. Artists connected with the PRB include Ford Madox Brown, W. B. Scott, William Dyce, Henry Wallis, Arthur Hughes, Burne-Jones and De Morgan. In literary terms, the movement's most important recruits were perhaps W. Morris and, more indirectly, Pater. The brotherhood dissolved in the 1850s, but its influence was enduring, and the term ‘Pre- Raphaelite’ has come to denote a distinctive style of appearance, décor, design, etc.

Pre-Raphaelites (1848–c.1854). The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, also known by the initials PRB, was a short-lived, essentially English, association of seven artists, including Holman Hunt, Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Disliking what they felt was the superficiality of 16th-cent. Italian art, they sought to recapture the direct religious sincerity of pre-Renaissance painting. The movement was very literary, painting deeply symbolic historical, poetic, or religious subjects with great attention to detail, using pure, bright colours. ‘The Pre-Raphaelites had but one idea—to present on canvas what they saw in Nature’ (Millais).

The work of the Brotherhood was, at first, well received. Only when the meaning of the initials PRB, on their paintings, became understood was there a protest, the brothers accused of blasphemy and of setting themselves up as better than Raphael. The influential art critic John Ruskin intervened on their behalf in 1851, and their reputation began to improve. Other artists adopted the brotherhood technique so that many paintings thought of as typically Pre-Raphaelite were not in fact painted by the founders. By the early 1850s the brotherhood was in decline and had dissolved by 1855. Rossetti founded a second brotherhood at Oxford with Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris (c.1860s–90s).

June Cochrane

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) Name adopted in 1848 by a group of young English painters who joined forces to revitalize British art. The most prominent members of the PRB were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and Holman Hunt. They attracted fierce criticism for their rejection of Raphael but were helped by the support of John Ruskin. By 1853 the PRB had largely dissolved but Rossetti maintained the name, and under his influence a second wave of Pre-Raphaelite painting began in the 1860s, which lasted well into the 20th century. See also Morris

Pre-Raphaelite a member of a group of English 19th-century artists, including Holman Hunt, Millais, and D. G. Rossetti, who consciously sought to emulate the simplicity and sincerity of the work of Italian artists from before the time of Raphael. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848 by seven young English artists and writers as a reaction against the slick sentimentality and academic convention of much Victorian art.

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