Pre-Raphaelites

Pre-Raphaelites (prē'-răf`ēəlīts'), brotherhood of English painters and poets formed in 1848 in protest against the low standards of British art. The principal founders were D. G. Rossetti, W. Holman Hunt, and John Millais. In poetry as well as painting, the Pre-Raphaelites turned away from the growing materialism of industrialized England. They sought refuge, through literary symbolism and imagery, in the beauty and comparative simplicity of the medieval world. In the works of the Italian painters prior to Raphael, they found a happy innocence of style that they tried to imitate. Influenced by the Nazarenes, a similar group of German painters founded in Rome in 1810, the Pre-Raphaelites declared themselves devotees of nature and truth. In the early 1850s their works were violently criticized, first by Charles Dickens, as being vulgar and ugly. They were defended by John Ruskin and attracted numerous followers, among whom were Edward Burne-Jones, G. F. Watts, and William Morris, but the group disbanded after 1853 and the movement died out before the end of the century. The paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites are characteristically nostalgic in tone and bright in color. Despite their predilection for simplicity, they were highly meticulous in detail and mannered in style. Eventually their painting became as artificial as the historical painting they had organized to protest. There is a fine collection of Pre-Raphaelite works at the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, Del.

Bibliography

See J. D. Hunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination (1969); J. Nicoll, The Pre-Raphaelites (1970); L. Stevenson, The Pre-Raphaelite Poets (1972); J. Sambrook, ed., Pre-Raphaelitism: A Collection of Critical Essays (1976); T. Hilton, Pre-Raphaelites (1985); J. Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Women: Images of Femininity (1988).

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Pre-Raphaelites

Group of young British painters, led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, who banded together in 1848 in reaction against what they considered the unimaginative and artificial historical painting of the 18th and early 19th centuries, seeking to express a new moral seriousness and sincerity in their works. Their name, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, honoured the simple depiction of nature in Italian art before Raphael; the symbolism, imagery, and mannered style of their paintings often suggest a faux-medieval world. Later members included Edward Burne-Jones and George Frederic Watts (1817–1904). The group also functioned as a school of writers who often used medieval settings, sometimes with shocking effect, as in William Morris's The Defence of Guenevere (1858), which deals with issues of love and sex. Though active less than 10 years, the group had a profound influence on the arts.

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Pre-Raphaelites 

a group of late-19th-century English artists and writers who set as their goal the revival of the “sincerity” and “naïve religiosity” of medieval and Early Renaissance art (before Raphael).

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848 by the poet and painter D. G. Rossetti and the painters J. E. Millais and W. H. Hunt. The three were influenced by F. M. Brown (and through him—by the German Nazarenes) and were supported by J. Ruskin. Advocating romantic criticism of bourgeois culture, the Pre-Raphaelites contrasted cold academicism, the roots of which they saw in the High Renaissance, with the “holy fire” and “living faith” of the “primitives,” who rejected modern aesthetics. This nonhistorical defense of the Middle Ages, linked with a demand for the “aestheticization” of contemporary life, led to a predominance in Pre-Raphaelite art of stylization, exaggerated decorativeness, and meticulous attention to detail.

Pre-Raphaelite poetry, particularly that of Rossetti, is reminiscent of Keats. It is marked by a sensitivity toward beauty (which links the Pre-Raphaelites closely with the poets Tennyson, Browning, and subsequently with Swinburne) and by a spiritualistic cult of love, based on the traditions of medieval Italian literature.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood disbanded in 1853. A revival of the movement occurred in the late 1850’s, when fresh forces —the artists W. Morris, E. Burne-Jones, W. Crane, and G. F. Watts—grouped around Rossetti. Pre-Raphaelite painting took on a decorative slant, with intricate, brightly colored, two-dimensional ornamentation and a mystical system of images (Rossetti, Burne-Jones).

The activities of the confirmed socialist Morris were broader in scope. He strove to re-create in industry a “spiritualized” handicraft production to replace the dehumanized, machine production. He also sought to introduce beauty into everyday life. Morris gathered together many master craftsmen, including F. M. Brown, A. Hughes, and the architect P. Webb, in a revival of English decorative applied art (drawings of the various articles produced in the workshops organized by Morris, the design of publications of the Kelmscott Press).

The ideas and work of the Pre-Raphaelites to a large extent influenced the development of symbolism and aestheticism of the fin de siècle in literature (W. Pater, O. Wilde). The Pre-Raphaelite movement promoted acceptance of art nouveau in the pictorial arts (A. Beardsley) and in the decorative arts. It laid the foundation for the theory of art’s “life-building” role in the social process.

REFERENCES

Vengerova, Z. A. Literaturnye kharakteristiki [vol. 1]—Prerafaelitskoe dvizhenie v Anglii. St. Petersburg, 1897.
Ruskin, J. Pre-Raphaelitism. London, 1851.
Fredeman, W. E. Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study. Cambridge, Mass., 1965.
Hunt, J. D. The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination: 1848–1900. [Lincoln], 1968.
Hönnigshausen, L. Präraphaeliten und Fin de Siėcle. Munich, 1971.

A. N. DOROSHEVICH