Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Art and Paintings

In art, Pre-Raphaelite means the style of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of English painters founded in London in 1848, and of the artists who followed them. The name points to art before the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael: the Royal Academy held Raphael up as the model, and these young artists looked back to earlier painters instead. The National Gallery in London lists their shared traits as a meticulous approach, brilliant colors worked into a wet white ground, complex symbolism and the study of subjects outside the studio.

Sources: National Gallery: Pre-Raphaelite (glossary) · Tate: Pre-Raphaelite

William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in London in 1848. Tate describes it as a secret society of young artists and one writer; a blue plaque at 7 Gower Street marks its founding. At first they signed their pictures with the initials PRB and refused to explain them, but by 1850 the meaning had leaked, and on January 1, 1850 they published a short-lived magazine, The Germ. Millais was only 19 when he began Isabella, one of the first paintings in the new style.

Sources: Tate: Pre-Raphaelite · Tate: Think you know the Pre-Raphaelites? · Walker Art Gallery: Millais, Isabella

Because they wanted to go back to art made before Raphael. The Royal Academy Schools held up the Renaissance painter Raphael as the summit of art, which the young painters saw as formulaic and backward-looking. They turned instead to medieval and early Renaissance painting, especially frescoes, with their flat compositions and minute detail, to recapture what they saw as its simplicity and truth. Tate adds that they were also in revolt against the trivial genre painting that was so popular at the time.

Sources: Tate: Think you know the Pre-Raphaelites? · Tate: Pre-Raphaelite

Pre-Raphaelite paintings are sharply detailed, brightly colored and full of symbols. The painters worked from nature, often outdoors, gave the background as much attention as the figures, and painted with pure colors on a white ground; Tate curator Alison Smith compares the result to a high-definition film “where the whole depth of field is sharp.” Their subjects were serious: Bible stories, scenes from Shakespeare, Keats and Tennyson, tales of love and death, and modern social problems.

Sources: Tate: Were the Pre-Raphaelites Britain's first modern artists? · Tate: Think you know the Pre-Raphaelites? · Tate: Pre-Raphaelite · National Gallery: Pre-Raphaelite (glossary)

It started in 1848, when the Brotherhood was founded in London. The Brotherhood itself dissolved in the early 1850s, and the Getty's art vocabulary dates the group to 1848–1853, but the movement went on: Tate describes a second phase from about 1860, inspired particularly by Rossetti, that made a major contribution to Symbolism. Edward Burne-Jones, whom Tate calls one of the last Pre-Raphaelites, worked until his death in 1898, and John William Waterhouse, born in 1849, painted Pre-Raphaelite subjects until his death in 1917.

Sources: Tate: Think you know the Pre-Raphaelites? · Getty AAT: Pre-Raphaelite · Tate: Pre-Raphaelite · Tate

The three founders, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, were the principal members. Ford Madox Brown was never a member but was closely associated with the group, Harvard Art Museums notes; Arthur Hughes showed at the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition in London in 1857; and John Brett followed John Ruskin's ideal of truth to nature. From about 1860 a second phase grew up around Rossetti, and Tate calls Edward Burne-Jones one of the last Pre-Raphaelites. Later painters such as John William Waterhouse and Evelyn De Morgan worked with Pre-Raphaelite themes.

Sources: Tate: Pre-Raphaelite · Harvard Art Museums: Ford Madox Brown, Self-Portrait · National Gallery of Victoria · Walker Art Gallery: John Brett, The Stonebreaker · De Morgan Foundation

The most widely known include Millais's Ophelia, Christ in the House of His Parents and The Blind Girl, Waterhouse's Hylas and the Nymphs, The Lady of Shalott and Echo and Narcissus, Holman Hunt's The Light of the World, Burne-Jones's The Beguiling of Merlin, Ford Madox Brown's The Last of England, and Rossetti's Beata Beatrix and Proserpine. Ophelia stands out: Tate says it is the most looked-at work on its website and the most popular postcard in its shop.

Sources: Tate: Think you know the Pre-Raphaelites? · Tate: Beata Beatrix · Tate: Proserpine

Many Pre-Raphaelite paintings center on a woman, often painted with pale skin and long red hair, the painters' ideal of beauty, as Tate's guide for young readers puts it. The best-known model was Elizabeth Siddal, an artist and poet herself, who posed in a bath for Millais's Ophelia, became Rossetti's muse and, in 1860, his wife; after her death he painted her as Dante's Beatrice in Beata Beatrix. Rossetti's friend Jane Morris was the model for Proserpine and for many of his later pictures.

Sources: Tate Kids: Who are the Pre-Raphaelites? · Tate: Think you know the Pre-Raphaelites? · Tate: Beata Beatrix · Tate: Proserpine

Yes. Tate says Pre-Raphaelitism gave space to women not only to appear in works of art as models but to become artists in their own right, and names May Morris and the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Elizabeth Siddal was an artist and poet as well as a model. Evelyn De Morgan used medieval themes and devices made popular by the Pre-Raphaelites, and Birmingham Museums shows paintings by Emma Sandys, Kate Bunce and Joanna Boyce Wells.

Sources: Tate: Were the Pre-Raphaelites Britain's first modern artists? · Tate Kids: Who are the Pre-Raphaelites? · De Morgan Foundation · Birmingham Museums: The Pre-Raphaelites

Not a member: Waterhouse was born in 1849, the year after the Brotherhood was founded, and painted his best-known pictures from the 1880s on. But he took up its subjects and ways of telling a story. Tate's label for his Lady of Shalott of 1888, from Tennyson's poem, points to its “familiar Pre-Raphaelite clues,” and Wikidata classes most of his famous paintings with the movement, which is why his work is on this page.

Sources: Tate

Because their realism and their subjects shocked Victorian viewers. Tate says their paintings were first regarded as assaults on the eye: other artists idealized religious figures, but the Pre-Raphaelites painted them with unprecedented realism, which some called sacrilegious or even blasphemous. Charles Dickens described the Virgin Mary in Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents as “horrible in her ugliness.” Their themes also included poverty, emigration, prostitution and the double standard of sexual morality.

Sources: Tate: Why were the Pre-Raphaelites so shocking?

In London, Tate Britain shows many of the best known, among them Ophelia, Beata Beatrix, Proserpine, The Lady of Shalott and The Awakening Conscience. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery says it has the largest collection of art and design by the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers in the world. Manchester Art Gallery has Hylas and the Nymphs, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool has Echo and Narcissus, and Keble College, Oxford, shows Holman Hunt's original The Light of the World in its chapel. In the United States, the Delaware Art Museum's collection is one of the largest outside Britain.

Sources: Tate · Birmingham Museums: The Pre-Raphaelites · Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (Google Arts & Culture) · Birmingham Museums, Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource (archived record) · Manchester Art Gallery (archived record) · Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool · Keble College, Oxford: The Light of the World · Delaware Art Museum: Pre-Raphaelite galleries

John Ruskin was a Victorian art critic whose ideas shaped the movement. Tate says the Pre-Raphaelites were inspired by his theories: he urged artists to “go to nature,” and they believed in serious subjects treated with maximum realism. The National Gallery notes that they enjoyed patronage and critical acclaim from writers such as Ruskin, and Ruskin wrote that John Brett's Stonebreaker went in some points of precision “beyond anything the Pre-Raphaelites have done yet.”

Sources: Tate: Pre-Raphaelite · National Gallery: Pre-Raphaelite (glossary) · Walker Art Gallery: John Brett, The Stonebreaker

Yes. Every painter on this page died by 1919, so their paintings are in the public domain in the United States and in countries where copyright ends 70 years after the artist's death. You can download them free and use them for anything, including commercial projects. A few countries have their own rules on photographs of artworks, so check them if you publish outside the U.S.

Sources: Cornell University Library: Copyright Term and the Public Domain