Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1850, a painting hanging at the Royal Academy showed the Holy Family inside a carpenter's workshop, and the writer Charles Dickens looked at it and recoiled. To him, Millais had painted the figures as alcoholics and slum-dwellers, twisted into absurd poses. He thought the young Mary was ugly. That painting, Christ in the House of His Parents, ignited a scandal around a tiny secret society of English painters, poets, and critics who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Seven men had founded it in 1848, and they signed their canvases with three mysterious initials, PRB, while hiding the group's very existence from their own teachers. Who were these young rebels, and why did they pick a fight with the most revered name in art history? What did they want to paint, and what tore them apart in less than five years? And how did a movement that nearly dissolved by 1853 end up shaping interior design, the Arts and Crafts movement, and even the imagination of the man who wrote The Lord of the Rings?

• 2. A Secret Brotherhood

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  John Millais's parents kept a house on Gower Street in London, and it was there in 1848 that the Brotherhood first met. Three painters were present that first night: Millais himself, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt. Hunt and Millais were students at the Royal Academy of Arts, and they had already crossed paths in another loose group, a sketching society called the Cyclographic Club. Rossetti and Hunt were sharing lodgings on Cleveland Street in Fitzrovia at the time.

  Rossetti, an aspiring poet, wanted to bind together Romantic poetry and visual art. In 1848 he asked to become a pupil of the painter Ford Madox Brown. By that autumn, four more men had joined to make a seven-member brotherhood: the painters James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens, Rossetti's brother William Michael Rossetti, who was a poet and critic, and the sculptor Thomas Woolner. The group modelled itself partly on the Nazarene movement.

  Ford Madox Brown was invited to join but chose to stay independent, though he supported the group throughout and contributed to its magazine. Other young artists drifted close, among them Charles Allston Collins and Alexander Munro. From the start, the members agreed to keep the brotherhood hidden from the men of the Royal Academy. That same year, Rossetti and Hunt drew up a list of artistic heroes they called the Immortals, drawn especially from literature, with Keats and Tennyson among them.

• 3. Why Pre-Raphael

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  The name itself was a declaration of war against a single artist. The Brotherhood believed that Raphael's Classical poses and elegant compositions had corrupted the teaching of art. They reached back instead toward the abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian painting, the work that came before Raphael. They rejected what they saw as the mechanistic approach of the Mannerist artists who followed Raphael and Michelangelo.

  Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder of the English Royal Academy, drew their special scorn, and they mocked him with a nickname, Sir Sloshua. William Michael Rossetti explained that to them sloshy meant anything lax or scamped in painting, and by extension anything commonplace or conventional. They tied their work to the critic John Ruskin, whose ideas were shaped by his religious background, and Christian themes ran all through their pictures.

  William Michael Rossetti set down their early doctrines as four declarations: to have genuine ideas to express, to study Nature attentively, to sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in earlier art, and most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues. These principles were deliberately non-dogmatic. The members, shaped by Romanticism, held that freedom and responsibility could not be separated, and that each artist had to decide his own ideas and methods.

• 4. Jewel-Like Color

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  Bitumen was the enemy. Earlier British painters such as Reynolds, David Wilkie, and Benjamin Robert Haydon had leaned on it, and it produced unstable patches of muddy darkness that the Pre-Raphaelites despised. Their answer was brilliance, sharp focus, and bright detail laid across a white canvas.

  Hunt and Millais worked out a method to chase the colour of Quattrocento art. They painted in thin glazes of pigment over a wet white ground, hoping the colours would keep a jewel-like transparency and clarity. The group studied the natural world closely, using great detail to render it.

  A tension sat inside this devotion to nature. The members were fascinated by medieval culture, which they believed held a spiritual and creative integrity lost in later ages. That medievalism clashed with the realist demand for independent observation of nature. Early on, the Brotherhood thought the two interests fit together, but in later years the movement split. Hunt and Millais led the realists; Rossetti and his followers, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, led the medievalists. The break was never total, since both sides held that art was essentially spiritual, setting their idealism against the materialist realism they linked to Courbet and Impressionism.

• 5. Scandal And Collapse

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  The year 1849 brought the first exhibitions of Pre-Raphaelite work. Millais's Isabella and Holman Hunt's Rienzi hung at the Royal Academy, while Rossetti's The Girlhood of Mary Virgin appeared at a Free Exhibition on Hyde Park Corner. As agreed, every member signed his work with his name and the initials PRB. Between January and April 1850 the group published a literary magazine, The Germ, edited by William Rossetti, carrying poetry by the Rossettis, Woolner, and Collinson, and essays by associates such as Coventry Patmore. The short run showed it never gained sustained momentum.

  Then came the blasphemy charge. In 1850 many reviewers, Dickens loudest among them, attacked Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents. Millais had used his sister-in-law, Mary Hodgkinson, as the model for Mary. Critics condemned the Brotherhood's medievalism as backward-looking and its devotion to detail as ugly and jarring.

  The fallout broke the group apart. James Collinson resigned, believing the Brotherhood was bringing the Christian religion into disrepute. The remaining members met to decide whether to replace him with Charles Allston Collins or Walter Howell Deverell, but could reach no decision. From that point the group disbanded, though its influence carried on, and artists who kept working in the style stopped signing their canvases PRB.

• 6. Ruskin And Effie

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  John Ruskin became the Brotherhood's champion. He praised its devotion to nature and its rejection of conventional composition, wrote to The Times defending the work, and then met the artists. At first he favoured Millais, who travelled to Scotland in the summer of 1853 with Ruskin and Ruskin's wife, Euphemia Chalmers Ruskin, now best known as Effie Gray. The main purpose of the trip was for Millais to paint Ruskin's portrait.

  On that journey Effie grew increasingly attached to Millais, and a crisis followed. In the annulment proceedings, Ruskin told his lawyer that his marriage had never been consummated. The marriage was annulled on grounds of non-consummation, which left Effie free to marry Millais but caused a public scandal.

  Millais began drifting from the Pre-Raphaelite style after his marriage, and Ruskin eventually attacked his later works. Ruskin kept supporting Hunt and Rossetti, and he provided funds to encourage the art of Elizabeth Siddal, who later became Rossetti's wife. By 1853 the original PRB had virtually dissolved, with only Holman Hunt staying true to its stated aims. Yet the term Pre-Raphaelite clung to Rossetti and to William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, with whom Rossetti became involved at Oxford in 1857.

• 7. Two Diverging Paths

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  After 1856 Rossetti became the inspiration for the medievalising strand of the movement, the link between its two types, nature and Romance, once the original brotherhood had faded. Though he was the least committed of the founders, he carried the name forward and changed its style. He painted versions of femmes fatales using models including Jane Morris, in works such as Proserpine, The Day Dream, and La Pia de' Tolomei.

  William Morris drew directly on Rossetti's example. Rossetti became a partner in Morris's firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., and may have had an affair with Morris's wife Jane. Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones joined the firm as partners too. Through that company the ideals of the Brotherhood reached interior designers and architects, stirring interest in medieval designs and crafts and leading to the Arts and Crafts movement headed by Morris. Holman Hunt took part in the movement to reform design through the Della Robbia Pottery company.

  Hunt and Millais moved the other way after 1850, away from direct imitation of medieval art and toward the realist and scientific side. Hunt still pressed the spiritual meaning of art, making careful observations in Egypt and Palestine for his biblical paintings. Millais abandoned Pre-Raphaelitism after 1860 for a broader, looser style influenced by Reynolds, and Morris and others condemned his reversal of principles.

• 8. A Long Afterlife

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  William Dyce, born in Aberdeen in 1806, was the Scottish artist most associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. He befriended the young members in London and introduced their work to Ruskin, and his own later paintings, The Man of Sorrows and David in the Wilderness, both from 1860, carried a Pre-Raphaelite attention to detail. Joseph Noel Paton, born in 1821, became a friend of Millais and followed him into the style with melodramatic, detailed pictures like The Bludie Tryst of 1855. James Archer, born in 1823, began a series of Arthurian paintings from 1861, including La Morte d'Arthur.

  The movement's reach stretched far beyond Britain. Rossetti came to be seen as a precursor of the European Symbolist movement, and some of Paula Modersohn-Becker's paintings show his influence. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery holds a world-renowned collection of Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelites that some say strongly shaped the young J. R. R. Tolkien, who likened his own circle of school friends, the TCBS, to the Pre-Raphaelites.

  Fashions turned against them. After the First World War their art was scorned as sentimental and concocted artistic bric-a-brac. Then in the 1960s came a major revival, building toward a 1984 exhibition at London's Tate Gallery that re-established a canon of their work, followed by another large show at Tate Britain in 2012-13. Andrew Lloyd Webber, an avid collector, showed 300 items from his collection at the Royal Academy in 2003. Kelmscott Manor, Morris's country home from 1871 until his death in 1896, still stands open to the public, owned by the Society of Antiquaries of London.