The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848 by three young painters — Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt — in explicit rebellion against what they saw as the mechanical conventionality of painting since Raphael. Inspired by the intensity and spiritual sincerity of fifteenth-century Italian and Flemish painting, they adopted a technique of vivid colour applied to a wet white ground, creating a jewel-like luminosity entirely unlike the darker tonal painting of the Academy. Their subjects combined medieval romance, literary illustration, and religious imagery with a radical attentiveness to the natural world, their landscapes painted in almost obsessive botanical detail. Though the original Brotherhood dissolved by 1853, a second wave led by Rossetti and including Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris transformed the movement into a broader aesthetic project that encompassed painting, poetry, design, and what became the Arts and Crafts movement. Pre-Raphaelite painting remains among the most beloved and widely reproduced art of the nineteenth century.
25-01 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – Early Days
25-02 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – Later
25-03 The PreRaphaelites, 1840-1860
25-04 The Pre-Raphaelite Sisters
The Brotherhood — A Youthful Rebellion Against the Academy: In 1848, Millais, Hunt, and Rossetti formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, signing their works with the mysterious initials “PRB” and declaring war on what they called “the slosh” of conventional academic painting. They were young — Millais was only nineteen — and their manifesto was clear: return to truth, to nature, and to the spiritual intensity of art made before Raphael corrupted it with theatrical grandeur.
The Technique — White Ground and Jewel-like Colour: The Pre-Raphaelites developed a distinctive technique: painting in thin, vivid glazes over a white or near-white ground while the paint was still wet, achieving a luminosity unlike anything in contemporary British painting. The result was a peculiarly intense, enamel-like quality of colour — greens more brilliantly green, reds more richly red — that made their canvases instantly recognisable.
Millais — From Rebel to President of the Academy: John Everett Millais is one of the most paradoxical figures in British art. His early PRB works — Christ in the House of His Parents (1850), Ophelia (1852) — are among the most technically accomplished and emotionally intense paintings of the century. Yet by the 1870s he had moved towards a more commercially successful, less technically radical manner, becoming eventually President of the Royal Academy — the very institution he had once revolted against.
Rossetti and the Femme Fatale: Dante Gabriel Rossetti never exhibited publicly after the furore surrounding his early PRB works, but his studio paintings — erotic, languid images of thick-necked, heavy-lipped women — became some of the most influential images of the century. His models, beginning with Elizabeth Siddal and later Jane Morris, were presented as archetypes of a mysterious, dangerous female beauty that influenced Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and popular culture to this day.
Hunt’s Religious Intensity: William Holman Hunt remained truest to the Brotherhood’s original ideals of moral and spiritual sincerity. He made several journeys to Palestine to paint religious subjects with documentary accuracy, believing that art had a duty to convey spiritual truth with factual precision. His The Light of the World (1851–54), showing Christ knocking at a door overgrown with weeds, became one of the most widely reproduced images of the Victorian era.
Burne-Jones and the Second Wave: In the 1860s and 1870s, Rossetti’s influence produced a second generation of Pre-Raphaelite painters, of whom Edward Burne-Jones was the most gifted. Burne-Jones moved the movement away from its original realist impulse towards a world of Arthurian romance, classical myth, and languorous, otherworldly beauty that anticipated Symbolism and profoundly influenced Art Nouveau across Europe.