Pre-Raphaelite (1848-1893)

Le miroir de Vénus (‘The Mirror of Venus’, 1875) by Edward Burne-Jones; Edward Burne-Jones, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Pre-Raphaelite (1848)

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, group of young British painters who banded together in 1848 in reaction against what they conceived to be the unimaginative and artificial historical painting of the Royal Academy and who purportedly sought to express a new moral seriousness and sincerity in their works.

Pre-Raphaelitism was the brainchild of three young rogue painters – Dante Gabriel Rosetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, all of whom found themselves disillusioned by what they believed to be the stuffy conventions of the Academy as a microcosmic artistic reflection of the values of a society. To them, the soul of the working class was being buried beneath the ruthless reach of industrialization, and that there was an associated severing of the common man from meaningful work and relationship with himself and nature.