Pre-Raphaelite art is the work of a group of young British painters who decided, in 1848, to paint the way artists had painted before Raphael: with bright, clear color, sharp detail in every part of the picture, and subjects taken from the Bible, from poetry and from modern life. The picture to see first is John Everett Millais's Ophelia, painted in 1851 and 1852 and now at Tate Britain.
The group called itself the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Its three founders were students of the Royal Academy, the institution that trained and exhibited Britain's painters: Millais, who was 19, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was 20, and William Holman Hunt, who was 21.
They soon brought in four companions, which made seven: the painters James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens, the sculptor and poet Thomas Woolner, and Rossetti's younger brother, William Michael, a critic. They met at the house of Millais's parents in Gower Street, in London, and what they wanted was a painting that looked at nature closely, leaf by leaf and face by face.
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The name puzzles most people at first. Raphael was one of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance, and yet these young men chose to define themselves by the painters who came before him, as if his art marked the point where something had gone wrong.
The reason lies in what the Royal Academy taught at the time. Raphael was the model every student was told to follow, and the founders thought that this teaching had turned painting into a set of formulas. Their name was a statement against their own school.
At first, though, the Brotherhood kept that statement to itself. Its members signed their paintings with three initials, PRB, and refused to say what the letters meant.
What You'll Discover
The nickname they gave the Academy's founder.
The old book that started everything.
Why Ophelia's model fell ill.
What Dickens saw in a carpenter's shop.
Why the Brotherhood broke up so quickly.
The famous Pre-Raphaelites who never joined.