In 1848, three young English painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt, formed a secret society they called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They were students at the Royal Academy, and they were in revolt against the formulaic, dark, and sentimental style their teachers praised. They proposed instead to paint with the intensity, detail, and honesty of Italian art before Raphael, hence their name, and to bring to modern subjects the seriousness once reserved for religion and myth.
The Pre-Raphaelites’ method was as radical as their doctrine. They painted on wet white grounds, which made every brushstroke glow with an almost enamel-like brilliance, and they pursued a fidelity to nature that bordered on obsession. When Millais painted Ophelia, he had his model lie in a bath for hours while he painted the surrounding plants and flowers outdoors, leaf by leaf; when Hunt painted sheep, he sat in the field so long the sheep learned to ignore him. The results are pictures of hallucinatory clarity: Ophelia floating among the water weeds, the pale, ecstatic face of the dead girl in the living stream; Hunt’s The Light of the World, in which Christ stands at a door hung with vines, a lantern in his hand.
The Brotherhood scandalized London and divided the critics, until John Ruskin, the most powerful critic of the age, defended them in print and gave the movement its respectability. As the Brotherhood dissolved in the 1850s, its members went their separate ways. Rossetti turned to a dreamier, more sensual style, painting a series of haunting beauties, while Hunt and Millais became establishment figures. The movement’s wider influence reached across Europe, touching the Symbolists and shaping the decorative arts.
The Pre-Raphaelites’ legacy is a permanent argument about what painting should be. Their work is reviled by some as overwrought and adored by many as the summit of romantic imagination. What cannot be denied is their courage: a group of young artists who insisted that painting should be as true to nature, and as full of meaning, as it had been in the days of the early Renaissance masters.
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