Pre-Raphaelite

Pre-Raphaelite is an art movement of the 1840–1900 period. The gallery holds 204 works in this movement, including works by John Everett Millais, Frederic Leighton and John Atkinson Grimshaw. Browse Pre-Raphaelite paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in London in 1848 by three young Royal Academy students — William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), John Everett Millais (1829–1896), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) — who, with four other members, formed a secret society dedicated to reinventing British painting. The name announced their programme: they revered the clear, sincere art of Italy *before* Raphael and the High Renaissance, and rejected the formulaic chiaroscuro and idealised composition taught in the academies, which they traced to Raphael's later, much-imitated grandeur. Their revolt unfolded against a backdrop of European upheaval — the 1848 revolutions and Britain's Chartist agitation — and shared with the earlier German Nazarenes a yearning to recover a lost spiritual directness, though the English group pursued it with far sharper naturalism.

Technically the Brotherhood was radical. Working on a wet, brilliant white ground, they laid thin glazes of pure pigment so that light shone back through the paint, producing the jewel-like colour, crisp outline, and shadowless clarity that distinguish their canvases. Forms were rendered in obsessive, near-botanical detail, often painted out of doors directly from nature. Subjects were drawn from the Bible, Shakespeare, Dante, Tennyson, and medieval legend, charged with moral and emotional sincerity.

The results scandalised critics. Millais's *Christ in the House of His Parents* (1849–50) was savaged by Charles Dickens for its unidealised Holy Family, but the influential critic John Ruskin defended the group in print and in his 1851 pamphlet *Pre-Raphaelitism*. Canonical works followed: Millais's luminous *Ophelia* (1851–52), the movement's most famous image; Hunt's devotional *The Light of the World* (1851–53); and Rossetti's sensuous later pictures such as *Beata Beatrix* and *Lady Lilith*, held in this collection alongside his portrait-subjects and Millais's *Portia* and Frederick Sandys's *Susanna Anderson Rose*.

Though the original Brotherhood dissolved within about five years, its influence proved profound. A second generation — Rossetti with Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris — channelled Pre-Raphaelite medievalism into the Aesthetic Movement and, through Morris's 1861 design firm, the Arts and Crafts revival of decoration, textiles, and the printed book. Their fusion of literary romance, dense colour, and idealised beauty echoed across late-Victorian Symbolism and continues to shape popular images of myth and legend.