| Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Essay, Research Paper
A 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. They were inspired by Italian
art of the 14th and 15th centuries, and their adoption of the name
Pre-Raphaelite expressed their admiration for what they saw as the direct and
uncomplicated depiction of nature typical of Italian painting before the High
Renaissance and, particularly, before the time of Raphael. Although the
Brotherhood’s active life lasted less than 10 years, its influence on painting
in Britain, and ultimately on the decorative arts and interior design, was
profound. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848 by
three Royal Academy students, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was a gifted poet as
well as a painter, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, all under 25.
The painter James Collinson, the painter and critic F.G.Stephens, the sculptor
Thomas Woolner, and the critic William Michael Rossetti (Dante Gabriel’s
brother) joined them by invitation. The painters William Dyce and Ford Madox
Brown were also notable practitioners of the Pre-Raphaelite style. The Brotherhood began immediately to produce highly
convincing and significant works. Their pictures of religious and medieval
subjects emulated the deep religious feeling and naive, unadorned directness of
15th-century Florentine and Sienese painting. The style that Hunt and Millaisevolved featured sharp and
brilliant lighting, a clear atmosphere, and a near-photographic reproduction of
minute details. They also frequently introduced a private poetic symbolism into their
representations of Biblical subjects and medieval literary themes. Rossetti’s work differed
from that of the others in its use of blurred lines, a more sculptural and
suggestive chiaroscuro, and a hazy, dreamlike atmosphere. Vitality and freshness of
vision are the most admirable qualities of these early Pre-Raphaelite
paintings. The Brotherhood at first exhibited together
anonymously, signing all their paintings with the monogram PRB. When their
identity and youth were discovered in 1850, their work was harshly criticized
by the novelist Charles Dickens, among others, not only for its disregard of academic
ideals of beauty but also for its apparent irreverence in treating religious
themes with an uncompromising realism. Nevertheless, the leading art
critic of the day, John Ruskin, stoutly defended Pre-Raphaelite art, and the
members of the group were never without patrons. The members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had
ceased to exhibit together by 1854 and soon went their individual ways, but
their style had a wide influence and gained many imitators during the 1850s and
early ’60s. In the late 1850s Dante Gabriel Rossetti became associated with the
younger painters Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris and moved closer to a
sensual and almost mystical romanticism. Millais, the most technically gifted
painter of the group, went on to become an academic success. Hunt alone pursued
the same style throughout most of his career and remained true to
Pre-Raphaelite principles. Pre-Raphaelitism in its later stage is epitomized by
the paintings of Burne-Jones, in which a lyrical if slightly insipid medievalism is
given hauntingly sensuous overtones.
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