Pre-Raphaelites

Pre-Raphaelites, group of 19th-century English painters, poets, and critics who reacted against Victorian materialism and the Neo-Classical conventions of academic art by producing earnest, quasi-religious works. The group was inspired by medieval and early Renaissance painters up to the time of the Italian painter Raphael. They were also influenced by the Nazarenes, young German artists who formed a brotherhood in Vienna in 1809 to restore Christian art to its medieval purity.

The leading members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement were the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the painters John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt. Other members were the painter James Collinson and the sculptor and poet Thomas Woolner; the art critics William Michael Rossetti (brother of Dante Gabriel) and Frederick George Stephens. In 1849, at the instigation of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed as a secret association, members signing their work with the initials “PRB”.

The Pre-Raphaelites deplored the imitative historic and genre painting of their day. Together they sought to revitalize art through a simpler, more positive vision. In portrait painting, for example, the group eschewed the sombre colours and formal structure preferred by the Royal Academy. Having an essentially Christian outlook, they found their inspiration in the comparatively sincere, religious, and scrupulously detailed art of the Middle Ages.

Though the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had dissolved by 1853, the movement itself continued to be influential. Edward Coley Burne-Jones and William Morris were for a time associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement and it was ardently supported by John Ruskin. Pre-Raphaelite art became distinctive for its blend of archaic, romantic, and moralistic qualities, but much of it has been criticized as superficial and sentimental, if not artificial. Examples of Pre-Raphaelite painting include Millais's Christ in the House of his Parents (1850, Tate Gallery, London) and Rossetti's The Wedding of St George and the Princess Sabra (1857, Tate Gallery, London).

In looking back to the Middle Ages, the school paralleled both the Oxford movement in the Anglican Church and a Gothic revival led by the English architect A. W. N. Pugin. For a time in 1850 the members of the group published a periodical called The Germ, in which some of Rossetti's earliest literary work appeared.