Pre-Raphaelite art is the work of a small group of young British painters who decided in 1848 to paint the way artists had painted before Raphael, the Italian master of the Renaissance.
Their pictures look sharper and brighter than anything around them. The one to look at first is John Everett Millais's Ophelia, painted in 1851 and 1852 and now at Tate Britain.
A young woman floats on her back in a stream, arms open, eyes raised, singing as she drowns. Around her, every leaf, petal and blade of grass is painted as clearly as her face.
The group called itself the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Its three founders were students at the Royal Academy, the London school that trained Britain's painters and showed their work every year.
The three were barely grown men. Millais was 19, Dante Gabriel Rossetti 20, and William Holman Hunt 21.
Four friends soon joined them, which made seven. Two were painters, James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens. Thomas Woolner was a sculptor and poet, and William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel's younger brother, wrote criticism.
The seven met at the house of Millais's parents in Gower Street, in the Bloomsbury district of London. What they wanted was an art that looked at nature closely, leaf by leaf and face by face.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
Their name puzzles most people at first. Raphael was one of the most admired painters who ever lived, and yet these young men named themselves after the painters who came before him, as if his art marked the point where something had gone wrong.
In their eyes, it had. At the Academy, Raphael was the model every student copied: graceful figures, balanced groups, poses borrowed from ancient statues. The founders felt that this lesson, repeated for generations, had turned painting into a set of formulas.
A secret society against Sir Sloshua
Those formulas had a face at the Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds…
What You'll Discover
Why Ophelia's model fell ill.
What a white canvas did to their colors.
What Dickens saw in a carpenter's shop.
Why the Brotherhood broke up so quickly.
The famous Pre-Raphaelites who never joined.