Pre-Raphaelite Art – A History of the Pre-Raphaelitism Art Period
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in London in 1848 by seven young artists and writers who challenged the conventions of British academic art. They pursued intense color, close observation, complex symbolism, and subjects from modern life, religion, poetry, medieval literature, and early Italian and Netherlandish art. The formal Brotherhood was brief, but its evolving circles transformed Victorian painting, illustration, poetry, photography, design, and debates about art and labor.
What Is Pre-Raphaelite Art?
The Brotherhood began with painters John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. They were joined by sculptor Thomas Woolner, painter James Collinson, critic Frederic George Stephens, and writer William Michael Rossetti. The initials “P.R.B.” appeared mysteriously on early works before the group’s identity became public.
Their name did not mean that they rejected Raphael’s art wholesale. It targeted what they saw as formulaic academic composition after Raphael, especially idealization, pyramidal figure groups, conventional chiaroscuro, and painting by inherited recipe. They admired early Italian and Netherlandish artists for clarity, detail, color, and spiritual directness, even though their idea of a “pure” pre-Raphael past was a selective Victorian construction.
Joshua Reynolds was not president of the Royal Academy when the Brotherhood formed—he died in 1792. His influential Discourses and the “Grand Manner” represented the academic tradition they mocked by calling him “Sir Sloshua.” The immediate academic context was broader than one man and included training methods, hierarchies of genre, exhibition culture, and expectations about finish.
The group articulated four principles: to have genuine ideas, to study nature attentively, to sympathize with what was serious and heartfelt in earlier art, and to produce thoroughly good pictures and sculpture. It had no single manifesto in the later avant-garde sense, but its members did formulate shared aims and published the short-lived journal The Germ in 1850.
Burne-Jones’s 1875 painting belongs to the later Pre-Raphaelite circle, not the original Brotherhood. Its dreamlike figures, compressed space, reflective water, and classical subject show how the movement shifted away from the early group’s hard-edged naturalism toward Aesthetic and symbolist beauty.
John Ruskin became a public defender after hostile reviews in 1851. His demand for “truth to nature” reinforced their close study, but the painters did not simply complete whole canvases en plein air. Millais painted the landscape of Ophelia outdoors and the figure later; Hunt combined on-site observation, studies, studio work, memory, and religious interpretation.
Literature provided subjects from Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Dante, the Bible, Arthurian romance, and medieval chronicles. Joseph Noel Paton shared interests with the circle but was not one of the seven Brotherhood founders. “Pre-Raphaelite” therefore describes both a specific organization and a wider, less precise field of influence.
Industrialization, class, urban poverty, prostitution, labor, and social reform appear in parts of Pre-Raphaelite and later Arts and Crafts culture. Still, the Brotherhood was not founded as a direct working-class protest. Its members’ politics and careers differed, and medievalism could be socially critical, religious, commercial, escapist, or all at once.
Characteristics of Pre-Raphaelite Artwork
Early Pre-Raphaelite paintings often feature brilliant color, sharply observed plants and objects, dense symbolic detail, compressed space, and figures that resist conventional idealization. The artists experimented with thin glazes over a wet or dry white ground to increase luminosity. They combined old-master references with modern materials and new visual intensity rather than reconstructing medieval technique exactly.
John Brett’s landscape links geological precision with exhausting labor and a setting sun. It complicates any notion that detailed nature painting is merely nostalgic. The figure, tools, distant railway, and ancient landscape bring different timescales into one scene.
| Characteristic | How It Appears | Qualification |
|---|---|---|
| Truth to nature | Specific plants, geology, light, and objects | Observation was combined with symbolism and studio construction |
| Luminous color | Glazes over a light ground, crisp local hues | Methods varied by artist and changed over time |
| Literary subject | Bible, Shakespeare, Dante, Tennyson, Arthurian romance | Modern social life and portraiture also mattered |
| Medievalism | Costume, architecture, craft, moral community | The medieval past was imagined through Victorian concerns |
| Women as central figures | Heroines, saints, lovers, readers, makers, models | Agency coexists with eroticization, passivity, and male-gaze conventions |
Pre-Raphaelite images did not simply liberate women from Victorian stereotypes. Powerful or desiring heroines can also be contained as fatal, abandoned, sleeping, or dead beauties. Models’ labor and identities were often subordinated to the male artist’s authorship. Feminist scholarship instead considers image, sitter, artist, patron, text, and social power together.
The movement also changed internally. Millais moved toward mainstream portraiture; Hunt maintained an exacting religious naturalism; Rossetti increasingly created half-length women with poetic and musical attributes; Burne-Jones developed dreamlike cycles; later followers connected Pre-Raphaelitism with Aestheticism, Symbolism, photography, book illustration, and design.
Notable artworks
The following three paintings by the founding painters reveal different forms of Pre-Raphaelite experiment: literary naturalism, biblical landscape, and a radically domestic Annunciation.
Ophelia (1851 – 1852) by John Everett Millais
Millais depicts the moment in Shakespeare’s Hamlet when Ophelia floats while singing before her clothes pull her under. He painted the riverbank along the Hogsmill River in Surrey over several months, then painted Elizabeth Siddal posing in a bathtub in the studio. Individually identifiable plants carry seasonal, literary, and symbolic associations, but the scene is constructed rather than a single instantaneous record.
Siddal’s work as a model was paid labor, and she was also an artist and poet. The familiar story says lamps under the bath went out, she became ill, and her father demanded that Millais pay medical expenses. Details have been repeated in varying forms; “pneumonia” should not be asserted without the strongest source.
Siddal pursued drawing, watercolor, design, and poetry before and during her relationship with Rossetti. Ruskin supported her work financially. She married Rossetti in 1860, experienced a stillbirth, and died in 1862 at age 32 from a laudanum overdose. Reducing her to an “addict” whose fate mirrored Ophelia replaces her creative life with a sensational myth.
The Scapegoat (1854 – 1856) by William Holman Hunt
Hunt drew on Leviticus 16, in which one goat is sacrificed and another symbolically bears the community’s sins into the wilderness. The live scapegoat was not itself the sacrificial victim. Hunt interpreted it typologically as a prefiguration of Christ and traveled to the Dead Sea region to seek a setting he considered historically and geographically convincing.
The Lady Lever Art Gallery dates its version 1854–56. Hunt combined outdoor work with later studio completion and designed a frame whose inscriptions extend the religious interpretation. His claim to accuracy must be read as Victorian biblical archaeology, shaped by Christian belief and British travel in Ottoman Palestine, not neutral access to the ancient past.
Ecce Ancilla Domini (1849 – 1850) by Dante Rossetti
Rossetti moves the Annunciation into a narrow white bedroom. Mary recoils on a low bed as Gabriel offers a lily; white garments and walls are interrupted by blue, red, and gold. Her alert unease replaces the composed reading figure familiar from many earlier Annunciations.
Christina Rossetti modeled for Mary, and William Michael Rossetti modeled for Gabriel. The Latin title means “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.” Early Italian and Netherlandish art mattered, but the picture’s compressed space, psychological tension, and stark color are Rossetti’s modern invention. Tate Britain owns both this work and Millais’s Ophelia.
The Second Generation
The original Brotherhood fragmented in the early 1850s, but Pre-Raphaelitism did not vanish. In the mid-1850s, Rossetti became central to a younger circle that included Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. In 1857 they joined an ambitious, technically unsuccessful project to paint Arthurian murals in the Oxford Union. Their colors faded rapidly because the walls were not properly prepared.
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. was founded in 1861—not 1961—by William Morris with Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Philip Webb, Peter Paul Marshall, and Charles Faulkner. It became Morris & Co. in 1875. The firm produced stained glass, textiles, wallpaper, furniture, embroidery, and other furnishings, connecting artistic design to workshop production.
The Arts and Crafts Movement
Arts and Crafts grew from overlapping ideas associated with Ruskin, Morris, A.W.N. Pugin, design reform, workshop practice, and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society founded in 1887. Its first exhibition in 1888 helped give decorative artists public standing. It was related to later Pre-Raphaelitism but was not simply triggered by one company.
Morris opposed dehumanizing divisions of labor more than every use of machinery. He wanted makers to connect design, materials, and execution. The movement’s beautiful objects were not automatically accessible to working people: skilled hand production often made them expensive. This economic contradiction is central to its social history.
The correct name is Wiener Werkstätte, founded in Vienna in 1903 by Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, and Fritz Waerndorfer. It shared an ideal of integrated design but developed in a different cultural and commercial setting. Arts and Crafts also influenced European reform movements, American Arts and Crafts communities, and architects associated with the Prairie School, mainly from the 1890s through the early 20th century rather than to 1950 as a single style period.
The Sisterhood
“Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood” is a useful corrective to an all-male story, but women did not form one equivalent secret organization. Their roles included painter, poet, designer, embroiderer, patron, critic, collaborator, manager, and model. Elizabeth Siddal, Marie Spartali Stillman, Evelyn De Morgan, Joanna Mary Boyce, Barbara Bodichon, and Anna Mary Howitt made art; Christina Rossetti was a major poet; Georgiana Burne-Jones, Jane Morris, and others sustained creative households and enterprises.
Effie Gray Millais was central to Pre-Raphaelite social history and Millais’s career but should not be listed as an artist without evidence. Models were workers and collaborators, yet modeling alone did not guarantee control over the resulting image. Recovering women’s agency means distinguishing their actual practices rather than recasting every relationship as empowerment.
Sophie Gengembre Anderson worked in a Victorian style related to Pre-Raphaelitism but was not a Brotherhood member. Her subject comes from Tennyson’s Arthurian writing and participates in the wider culture of literary medievalism.
The movement’s legacy is neither a simple retreat from modernity nor an uncomplicated liberation. Its vivid surfaces and medieval dreams were made within industrial Britain, exhibited through modern markets, and sustained by global materials and patronage. That tension helped make Pre-Raphaelitism durable.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why Were They Called the Pre-Raphaelites?
The name announced admiration for early Italian and Netherlandish art and opposition to academic formulas associated with Raphael’s later followers. The Brotherhood did not simply reject Raphael himself or copy one uniform “medieval” style.
When Was the Pre-Raphaelite Period?
The Brotherhood formed in 1848 and fragmented in the early 1850s. A wider Pre-Raphaelite circle developed in the mid- and late 1850s around Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Morris, and others, and its influence continued through later Victorian art, Aestheticism, Arts and Crafts, Symbolism, and early-20th-century design.
What Were the Pre-Raphaelites Rebelling Against?
They challenged formulaic academic composition, conventional idealization, routine chiaroscuro, genre hierarchies, and painting from inherited rules rather than close study. Some later work also confronted industrial labor, class, sexuality, and Victorian social norms, but members did not share one political program.
What Was the Aim of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?
Their stated principles were to express genuine ideas, study nature attentively, respond to serious and heartfelt earlier art, and make thoroughly good work. They joined exact observation to literary, religious, historical, and modern subjects.
What Does Pre-Raphaelite Mean?
Literally, it means “before Raphael.” In art history, it refers first to the seven-member Brotherhood founded in London in 1848 and, more broadly, to artists and writers influenced by its naturalism, medievalism, brilliant color, literary subjects, and reforming ambitions.
Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.
Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.
Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team.
Cite this Article
Isabella, Meyer, “Pre-Raphaelite Art – A History of the Pre-Raphaelitism Art Period.” Art in Context. May 10, 2021. URL: https://artincontext.org/pre-raphaelite-art/
Meyer, I. (2021, 10 May). Pre-Raphaelite Art – A History of the Pre-Raphaelitism Art Period. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/pre-raphaelite-art/
Meyer, Isabella. “Pre-Raphaelite Art – A History of the Pre-Raphaelitism Art Period.” Art in Context, May 10, 2021. https://artincontext.org/pre-raphaelite-art/.
