Pre-Raphaelites

Pre-Raphaelites, a group of 19th-century English painters, poets, and critics who reacted against Victorian materialism and the neoclassical conventions of academic art by producing earnest, quasi-religious works. The group was inspired by medieval and early Renaissance painters up to the time of the Italian painter Raphael. They were also influenced by the Nazarenes, young German artists who formed a brotherhood in Rome in 1810 to restore Christian art to its medieval purity.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established in 1848, and its central figure was the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Other members were his brother, William Michael Rossetti, an art critic; painters John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt; art critic Frederick George Stephens; painter James Collinson; and sculptor and poet Thomas Woolner.

Essentially Christian in outlook, the brotherhood deplored the imitative historic and genre painting of their day. Together they sought to revitalize art through a simpler, more positive vision. In portrait painting, for example, the group eschewed the somber colors and formal structure preferred by the Royal Academy. They found their inspiration in the comparatively sincere, religious, and scrupulously detailed art of the Middle Ages. Pre-Raphaelite art became distinctive for its blend of archaic, romantic, and moralistic qualities, but much of it has been criticized as superficial and sentimental, if not artificial. Millais eventually left the group, but other English artists joined it, including the painter and designer Edward Coley Burne-Jones and the poet and artist William Morris. The eminent English art critic John Ruskin was an ardent supporter of the movement. Examples of Pre-Raphaelite painting include Millais's The Carpenter Shop (1850, Tate Gallery, London) and D. G. Rossetti's The Wedding of St. George and the Princess Sabra (1857, Tate Gallery).

In literature, the works of the Pre-Raphaelites may be considered a recurrent phase of the romantic movement. In looking back to the Middle Ages, the school paralleled both the Oxford movement in the Anglican church and a Gothic revival led by the English architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. For a time in 1850 the members published a periodical called The Germ, in which some of Rossetti's earliest literary work appeared.