Pre-Raphaelite
Pre-Raphaelite refers to the style originated by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), founded by a group of English artists, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, active between 1848 and 1853.
Pre-Raphaelite paintings are theatrically romantic, characterized by intense color, tight handling, intricate realism and great attention to detail. During the later nineteenth century however the style became broader and more muted in color through the work of the Brotherhood’s followers including Sir Edward
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Pre-Raphaelite
Pre-Raphaelite refers to the style originated by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), founded by a group of English artists, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, active between 1848 and 1853.
Pre-Raphaelite paintings are theatrically romantic, characterized by intense color, tight handling, intricate realism and great attention to detail. During the later nineteenth century however the style became broader and more muted in color through the work of the Brotherhood’s followers including Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, William Morris, Simeon Solomon, Charles Edward Hallé, John Maler Collier and Edward Robert Hughes.
The Pre-Raphaelite painters looked primarily to nature and banished the heavy, dark colors of the academic painting of the time replacing them with bright, naturalistic detail painted on a wet, white ground to give added brilliancy; paintings were often completed en plein air. The Pre-Raphaelite group especially admired the simplicity and sincerity of Quattrocento art and rejected the contemporary sterile and formulaic academicism, which they perceived to have descended from the Bolognese followers of Raphael. Pre-Raphaelite paintings were typically of a serious subject matter, either of a religious or romantic nature, and were predominantly pulled from literary sources: the Bible; Shakespeare; Keats and Tennyson; as well as Arthurian and Greek Legend.
By 1853 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood itself had virtually dissolved, but the Pre-Raphaelite style remained popular for decades, influencing the Arts and Crafts Movement, Symbolist painters and the Victorian Classicists.
