In 1848, a handful of young painters in London decided that English art had been following the wrong master. The press soon turned on them, and Charles Dickens called one painter's holy family "revolting." Even today the pictures can stir a quarrel: in 2018, a museum took one off its wall for seven days to hear what visitors would say.
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How These Were Chosen
In 1848, London art students were taught to admire Raphael, the master the Royal Academy held up as the model. A few young painters rebelled. They formed a secret society, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, to paint serious subjects as truthfully as they could.
Truth meant real places and real people. They painted on actual riverbanks and in actual rooms, and they asked wives, fathers and friends to pose, so a saint or a goddess often wears a face from their own circle.
Every picture here tells a story, from the Bible, poetry or myth, or from Victorian life. The list follows the first brotherhood and the painters who carried it on, which is why half of the painters never belonged to the original group.
12. John William Waterhouse, Hylas and the Nymphs (1896)
One of the nymphs already has a hand on Hylas's arm. He kneels at the edge of a lily pond, dressed in blue, a jug in his left hand, and leans toward the water, where seven young women have risen among the pads, their long dark hair threaded with white and yellow flowers.
Hylas comes from Greek myth. He was one of the Argonauts who sailed with Jason in search of the Golden Fleece. Sent ashore on an island to fetch fresh water, he found a spring, and the nymphs who lived in it drew him down into it. His friends never saw him again.
John William Waterhouse painted the scene in 1896 and stopped just before that ending. Hylas is still on the bank, the jug still in his hand. The view looks down on the pond with no sky at all, and where the lily pads part, the water turns clear enough to show the stalks and the nymphs' pale bodies. Their seven faces are hard to tell apart.
More than a century later, the picture found itself at the center of a quarrel. On January 26, 2018, Manchester Art Gallery, which had owned it since 1896, took it down. The artist Sonia Boyce had been invited to lead an evening takeover of the gallery, and the removal was part of that event, meant to open a discussion about how the collection represents gender, class, race and sexuality.
Postcards of Hylas vanished from the gift shop as well, and visitors left their reactions on sticky notes. Some commentators called the move censorship. After seven days, the canvas went back on the wall.
At a Glance
Artist: John William Waterhouse (1849 to 1917)
Painted: 1896
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 98.2 × 163.3 cm (38.7 × 64.3 in)
Where to see it: Manchester Art Gallery
11. Ford Madox Brown, Work (1852 to 1865)
A trench cuts across a street in Hampstead, in north London, and a wealthy man and his daughter on horseback have had to stop at its edge. Between them and the road ahead, a gang of navvies, the laborers who dug Victorian Britain's roads and sewers, goes on digging and does not step aside.