c. 1848–1900

Pre-Raphaelites

In 1848 three young painters in London founded a secret brotherhood against the Royal Academy. They wanted to paint like the artists before Raphael, with glowing colours, exact nature and serious subjects from the Bible, the Middle Ages and poetry. Their provocation became one of the most influential art movements of Victorian England.

A drowning woman among flowers

London, 1851. In his studio, John Everett Millais had a young woman lie in a bathtub full of water, wearing an old embroidered dress. Small oil lamps beneath the tub were meant to warm the water. According to the story, they went out one day without the absorbed painter noticing. The model, Elizabeth Siddal, caught a severe cold. Her father demanded that Millais pay her doctor’s bills.

The result was Ophelia, the drowning woman from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, floating singing down the river, surrounded by flowers that each carry a meaning. Millais had painted the riverbank beforehand outdoors for months beside the Hogsmill River in Surrey, leaf by leaf. Today the picture is one of the best-loved works in Tate Britain.

A secret brotherhood

In September 1848 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, all around twenty, founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with four other members. They rejected the teaching of the Royal Academy, which held up Raphael and his successors as the standard. Their ideal was the painting of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance: honest, detailed and serious. They secretly added the initials “PRB” to their pictures.

Technically they broke new ground. They painted onto a freshly applied white ground so that the colours would glow like jewels, and studied every plant and every stone from nature.

Scandal and rescue

When it became known in 1850 what the letters stood for, a storm broke out. Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents shows the Holy Family in a shabby carpenter’s workshop with dirty feet and wood shavings. The writer Charles Dickens savaged the picture in public. In 1851 the influential critic John Ruskin defended the young painters in letters to The Times, and the tide turned.

Women in the movement

For a long time the women of the Pre-Raphaelites were seen mainly as models and muses with flowing hair. In fact several were artists themselves. Elizabeth Siddal, whom Rossetti later married, painted and wrote poetry and was supported by Ruskin. Marie Spartali Stillman and Evelyn De Morgan left extensive bodies of work. In 2019 the National Portrait Gallery in London devoted the exhibition Pre-Raphaelite Sisters to them.

The second generation

When Millais was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1853, the brotherhood fell apart. Rossetti, however, became the centre of a second generation. Edward Burne-Jones painted dreamlike scenes from myth and Arthurian legend, and William Morris founded a firm for wallpaper, textiles and furniture and became the father of the Arts and Crafts movement. As late as 1888, John William Waterhouse painted his Lady of Shalott entirely in the Pre-Raphaelite spirit.

Why they still matter

The Pre-Raphaelites are regarded as the first British avant-garde. They rebelled against the Academy, radicalised the study of nature and thought of art, craft and design together. Through Morris and Arts and Crafts, lines lead to Art Nouveau and the Bauhaus. Their world of red-haired women, knights and enchanted gardens still shapes book illustration, film and fantasy.