The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

In 1848, three young men sat together in a London studio and decided to burn it all down.

Not literally — though their critics would have happily handed them the matches. What Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais set fire to was an entire artistic tradition: the smooth, idealised, morally laundered painting that the Royal Academy had been producing since the 18th century. They were 19, 20 and 21 years old. They had no idea they were about to change art history.

What they founded — the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) — lasted barely seven years as a formal group. Its influence has lasted nearly two centuries.

This is the complete guide: who they were, what they believed, how they painted, which works you need to know, and why this movement still feels electrifyingly alive today.

Table of Contents

1. What Is the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?
2. The Context: Victorian England and the Academy's Stranglehold
3. The Founding Three — and the Full Brotherhood
4. The Pre-Raphaelite Manifesto: Seven Core Beliefs
5. Pre-Raphaelite Techniques: How They Actually Painted
6. The Great Themes
7. The Key Artists: A Portrait Gallery
8. The 12 Masterpieces You Must Know
9. The Second Wave and the Aesthetic Movement
10. Pre-Raphaelitism vs. Romanticism: What's the Difference?
11. The Legacy: From Symbolism to Tolkien to Today
12. FAQ
13. Bring Pre-Raphaelite Art Into Your Home

1. What Is the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a secret society of British painters, poets and critics founded in London in 1848. Their central conviction was simple and radical: that Western art had gone catastrophically wrong at the moment Raphael became the undisputed master of the Renaissance.

In their eyes, the Italian High Renaissance — Raphael, Michelangelo, their followers — had replaced genuine feeling and meticulous observation with empty formula. Perfectly balanced compositions. Idealised faces with no individual character. Smooth surfaces that looked polished, not real. The Royal Academy in London had inherited and calcified this tradition, teaching it as the only way to make serious art.

The PRB wanted to go back — not to copy the past, but to recover what had been lost: the sincerity, the symbolic intensity, the raw colour, and the obsessive detail of the painters who came before Raphael. Flemish masters like Jan van Eyck. Early Italians like Fra Angelico and Botticelli.

The name said it all: Pre-Raphaelite. Before Raphael. A reset.

2. The Context: Victorian England and the Academy's Stranglehold

To understand why the PRB mattered, you need to understand what English painting looked like in 1848.

The Royal Academy of Arts, founded in 1768, had effectively monopolised artistic taste and career advancement in Britain for eighty years. To exhibit there was to exist as an artist. To be rejected was to struggle in obscurity. And the Academy had very clear ideas about what "serious" painting was.

It meant history painting — grand narratives from classical antiquity or the Bible, rendered in the smooth, heroic style descended from Raphael and codified by the Academy's first president, Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds had given a series of lectures (the Discourses) that became the bible of English academic art. Their central argument: the aim of painting is the ideal, not the real. You should paint humanity as it ought to look, not as it actually does.

The PRB found this philosophically dishonest and visually deadening. They had another grievance too: the Royal Academy's teaching was astonishingly bad. Students spent years copying plaster casts of antique sculpture before they ever painted from life. The technical knowledge was frozen.

Meanwhile, Victorian England was electrified by change. The railways. The Great Exhibition of 1851. Darwin. Social reform movements. Photography, which made the old painterly claims to documentary realism look suddenly absurd. It was a moment when everything was being questioned — and the PRB were its art.

3. The Founding Three — and the Full Brotherhood

The Brotherhood was founded in September 1848 by three Royal Academy students. Their first act was to sign their paintings with the mysterious initials PRB — which they kept secret for two years, allowing critics to speculate wildly about the meaning.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)

The most charismatic and the most flawed...

William Holman Hunt (1827–1910)

The true believer...

John Everett Millais (1829–1896)

The prodigy...

The Other Members

The original seven also included:

• James Collinson (1825–1881) — a timid, pious painter who resigned from the Brotherhood when he converted to Catholicism
• Frederick George Stephens (1828–1907) — later became an influential art critic
• Thomas Woolner (1825–1892) — the only sculptor in the group
• William Michael Rossetti (1829–1919) — the Brotherhood's secretary and chronicler

4. The Pre-Raphaelite Manifesto: Seven Core Beliefs

The PRB published a short-lived journal called The Germ (four issues, 1850) that articulated their aesthetic programme. Extracted from their writings and paintings, their core beliefs were:

1. Truth to nature above all else. Paint what you actually see, not what convention tells you to paint. This meant botanical accuracy in flowers, individual faces rather than generic ideal types, real landscapes painted on location rather than assembled in the studio.

2. Reject the "slosh." They coined this contemptuous term for the dark, bituminous shadows that dominated academic painting — the deliberate murkiness of Reynolds and his descendants. PRB paintings are famously luminous.

3. Paint on a white ground. To achieve their famous chromatic intensity, PRB painters applied their pigments to a white or near-white wet ground, so colours reflected light from beneath rather than being absorbed into a dark base.

4. Take medieval and early Renaissance art seriously. Not as primitive antecedents to be superseded, but as models of sincerity and symbolic richness. Fra Angelico, Van Eyck, and Memling were as important to them as any modern master.

5. Treat literary and symbolic subjects with full seriousness. Shakespeare, Keats, Malory, Dante, Tennyson — literature was not an excuse for anecdote but a source of genuine moral and emotional weight.

6. Work from live models for everything. Academic convention allowed figures to be assembled from sketches, memory, and tradition. The PRB insisted on painting direct from life, which is why Elizabeth Siddal spent hours lying in a bath of water (heated from below by oil lamps) while Millais painted Ophelia.

7. Defy convention even at personal cost. The PRB's early exhibitions were received with savage hostility. Dickens's attack on Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (1850) called it "mean, odious, revolting and repulsive." They kept going anyway.

5. Pre-Raphaelite Techniques: How They Actually Painted

PRB paintings are immediately recognisable partly because of their technical distinctiveness.

The White Ground Method

Academic painters typically worked on a brownish or grey ground, building up shadows with glazes of dark paint. The PRB reversed this. They would lay a layer of wet white paint on the canvas, then apply their colours directly into this wet surface — a method called mezzo fresco by analogy to fresco painting. The result: colours that seem to glow from within. Look at any Millais from the 1850s and you will see light that comes from the painting itself.

Botanical Obsession

The PRB documented plant life with an accuracy that embarrasses most botanical illustrators. Millais's Ophelia is almost a complete catalogue of the plants of a southern English riverbank, each rendered with scientific precision. Rossetti's backgrounds sometimes read as pressed-flower archives.

The Long Gaze

PRB painters spent extraordinary amounts of time looking before they painted. Hunt reportedly spent weeks observing a single sheep to paint the flock in Our English Coasts (1852). This is visible in the paintings — there is a quality of sustained attention, of things truly seen rather than conventionally rendered, that gives PRB work its strange intimacy.

Colour

The PRB loved intense, saturated colour — vermilion, cobalt blue, emerald green, gold — applied with a transparency that prevents them from looking muddy. They rejected the tonal grey-brown unifying palette of academic painting in favour of something closer to manuscript illumination or stained glass.

Detail

Detail in PRB paintings is almost hallucinatory. The individual hairs on a woman's head. The stamens of specific flowers. The grain of medieval wood. This is not decoration — it is a philosophical commitment to the particular over the general, to the world as it actually exists rather than as it should ideally appear.

6. The Great Themes

Women: Muses, Models, Subjects

The PRB's relationship to women is one of the most discussed aspects of the movement. On one hand, the Brotherhood gave unprecedented prominence to female subjects treated with psychological complexity rather than as allegorical props. On the other, the dynamic between male artist and female model was often exploitative, and the women were frequently mythologised beyond individuality.

The great models — Elizabeth Siddal, Jane Morris, Annie Miller, Fanny Cornforth — became part of the artistic mythology. Siddal herself became a painter and poet of real quality, largely overshadowed by her relationship with Rossetti.

Medievalism

The Middle Ages were everywhere in Victorian culture — in Gothic Revival architecture, in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, in the Pre-Raphaelites' paintings of Arthur, Guinevere, and the Lady of Shalott. But the PRB medievalism was not simply nostalgic. It was a critique of the present: the medieval world represented handcraft against industrialisation, community against alienation, spiritual intensity against commercial shallowness.

Mythology and Antiquity

Especially in Waterhouse and the later PRB, classical mythology provided a vocabulary for exploring desire, fate, and the relationship between mortals and the divine. The nymph, the sorceress, the abandoned woman — Circe, Medea, Ariadne — appear again and again as figures of female power and vulnerability.

Religion and Doubt

The 1850s were a decade of intense religious crisis in Britain. Darwin's ideas were circulating before The Origin of Species was published (1859); the Oxford Movement was dividing the Church of England; geology was making the biblical chronology untenable. PRB religious paintings — Hunt's The Light of the World, Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents — were interventions in this crisis, not simply devotional images.

Literature

Shakespeare, Dante, Keats, Tennyson, Malory — the PRB read deeply and painted what they read. Ophelia, the Lady of Shalott, Isabella and Lorenzo, Beata Beatrix — these are literary subjects treated with the same seriousness as religious ones. The PRB believed that great literature generated genuine moral weight, and that painting it was not illustration but interpretation.

Social Conscience

Not all PRB work was beautiful and escapist. Hunt's The Awakening Conscience (1853) depicted a kept woman suddenly struck by remorse. Ford Madox Brown's Work (1852–65), while not strictly PRB, was painted in close dialogue with the movement and is one of the great Victorian social panoramas. Rossetti's Found (never completed) depicted a fallen woman in a London street.

7. The Key Artists: A Portrait Gallery

The Founders

Already discussed above: Rossetti, Hunt, Millais.

John William Waterhouse (1849–1917)

Waterhouse is the painter most people picture when they think "Pre-Raphaelite," even though he was technically a second-generation figure who never belonged to the Brotherhood. He combined PRB colour and literary subject matter with a classical training that gave his figures a sculptural solidity the originals sometimes lacked.

His great subjects are women from mythology and literature: Ophelia, Circe, the Lady of Shalott, Hylas and the Nymphs, Miranda, Pandora, the Danaïdes. He painted many of these subjects multiple times, each version finding a new emotional angle.

Explore our John William Waterhouse collection

Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898)

The most purely aesthetic of the Pre-Raphaelites. Where Hunt preached and Millais observed, Burne-Jones dreamed. His paintings — The Golden Stairs, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, the great Briar Rose series — exist in a world of pure colour and melancholy beauty that anticipates Symbolism and Art Nouveau. He was Rossetti's most devoted student and carried the movement's second phase into the 1890s.

Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893)

Never an official member of the Brotherhood but deeply involved with it. His Work is probably the most ambitious Victorian painting on a social theme. His The Last of England (1852–55) — painted from his own face and that of his wife as they contemplate emigration — is one of the most emotionally direct images in British art.

William Morris (1834–1896)

Another non-member who was essential. Morris came to painting through Rossetti's influence, but quickly found his calling in the decorative arts — textiles, wallpaper, furniture, typography, architecture. His firm, Morris & Co., translated PRB aesthetics into objects for the home and sparked the Arts and Crafts Movement, which transformed design across Europe and America.

Explore our William Morris collection

Elizabeth Siddal (1829–1862)

Siddal was Rossetti's model, lover, and eventually wife — and a significant artist in her own right. Her paintings, drawings, and poems show a distinctive sensibility that the dominant narrative (tragic muse, consumed by genius) has consistently undervalued. She died aged 32, apparently from a laudanum overdose.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (detailed)

Rossetti's painting divides into two phases. The early work — The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849), Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850) — is angular, intense, almost icon-like, directly inspired by early Italian masters. The later work — Beata Beatrix (1864–70), Proserpine (1874), The Day Dream (1880) — is more languid, symbolist, steeped in medieval literary atmosphere. The women are always the point: they gaze back at you from across a chasm of feeling.

8. The 12 Masterpieces You Must Know

1. Ophelia — John Everett Millais (1851–52)

The painting that defines the movement in the popular imagination. Elizabeth Siddal floats in a stream among flowers of precise botanical symbolism, her lips parted in the moment between life and death. Millais painted the landscape first, then had Siddal pose in a bath for the figure. She developed a severe cold during the sittings; Millais's father reportedly paid her medical bills.

The flowers are not decoration. Poppies (death and sleep), willows (forsaken love), daisies (innocence), nettles (pain), violets (faithfulness in death) — every detail is a word in a visual language.

Now at the Tate Britain, London.

2. The Lady of Shalott — John William Waterhouse (1888)

Tennyson's poem about a woman condemned to see the world only through a mirror — until she looks directly at Lancelot and the mirror cracks. Waterhouse's version shows her in the boat, the candles already guttering, weaving her own fate. The three candles — two extinguished, one still burning — are pure Pre-Raphaelite symbolism.

A later version (1894) shows her standing at the loom at the moment the mirror cracks.

Now at the Tate Britain, London.

3. Beata Beatrix — Dante Gabriel Rossetti (c. 1864–70)

Painted as a memorial to Elizabeth Siddal after her death, this is one of the most emotionally devastating works in Victorian art. Siddal appears as Beatrice from Dante's Vita Nuova at the moment of her death — eyes closed, face transfigured, a red dove (death) delivering a poppy (sleep, oblivion) into her hands. Rossetti worked on it for years, returning to it repeatedly, unable to finish or to leave it alone.

Now at the Tate Britain, London.

4. The Light of the World — William Holman Hunt (1851–53)

Christ knocking at an overgrown, long-unopened door — a door that has no handle on the outside, because the door of the soul can only be opened from within. Hunt worked on this painting by lamplight to capture authentic nocturnal illumination. The symbolism is dense: the weeds at the threshold (neglect of the soul), the lantern (the light of conscience), the bat and the owl (creatures of spiritual darkness).

There are three versions. The largest, painted by Hunt nearly blind in old age, is at St Paul's Cathedral, London. The original (smaller) is at Keble College, Oxford.

5. Proserpine — Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1874)

Jane Morris as the goddess of the underworld, holding a half-eaten pomegranate — the fruit that condemns her to spend half the year in Hades. The painting is almost claustrophobic: she is trapped in the frame as she is trapped in her fate. Rossetti painted multiple versions. The relationship between the painting and his feelings for Jane Morris — wife of his friend William, and his own great unrequited passion — is impossible to separate from the image.

Now at the Tate Britain, London.

6. Christ in the House of His Parents — John Everett Millais (1849–50)

The painting that nearly destroyed Millais's career. A carpenter's workshop; Mary and Joseph tend to the young Jesus, who has cut his hand on a nail — a prefiguration of the Crucifixion. The figures are painted with unflinching realism: Joseph has calloused workman's hands, the Virgin has a recognisably ordinary face. Dickens's furious review called it blasphemous. Ruskin defended it as a masterpiece of symbolic painting. Both were right about what it was doing — they disagreed only on whether that was acceptable.

Now at the Tate Britain, London.

7. The Awakening Conscience — William Holman Hunt (1853)

A kept woman rises suddenly from her lover's lap, face transfigured by a moment of spiritual clarity visible in the window-reflected garden behind her. Hunt painted every detail of the vulgar, over-furnished Victorian parlour with deliberate satirical intent: the furniture is new but already has a tawdry quality, the cat beneath the table plays with a bird, the music on the piano is a popular song about loss. It is a painting about the difference between surface and substance.

Now at the Tate Britain, London.

8. Hylas and the Nymphs — John William Waterhouse (1896)

Hylas, companion of Hercules, bends over a pool to drink and is pulled in by the water nymphs. Waterhouse painted seven identical faces — the same model, repeated and varied — surrounding the young man in a ring. The painting was briefly removed from Manchester Art Gallery in 2018 for a "curator's commentary" installation about the male gaze; the resulting controversy generated more discussion of the painting than any scholarly analysis.

Now at Manchester Art Gallery.

9. King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid — Edward Burne-Jones (1884)

A king sits at the feet of a beggar girl he has chosen as his queen, his armour discarded at her feet. Burne-Jones was interested in the paradox of power surrendered to beauty, of rank dissolved by love. The colour — gold and muted rose against deep grey-green — is extraordinary. Ruskin called it one of the greatest paintings produced in his lifetime.

Now at the Tate Britain, London.

10. The Golden Stairs — Edward Burne-Jones (1880)

Eighteen women descend a spiral staircase in a procession of melancholy beauty. There is no narrative, no allegory, no symbolism the artist ever explained. The painting is pure aesthetic experience — rhythm, colour, form, repetition. Its models included several of the great beauties of London society. It anticipates the Aesthetic Movement's manifesto that art need have no purpose but beauty itself.

Now at the Tate Britain, London.

11. Isabella — John Everett Millais (1848–49)

One of the earliest PRB paintings, this depicts the scene from Boccaccio's Decameron (via Keats's poem) in which Lorenzo, a merchant's employee, dines with the family of his beloved Isabella — who have already decided to murder him. The brother crushing an orange to the right, the greyhound between them, the doomed intimacy across a laden table — it is a painting in which every detail tells a different part of the story.

Now at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

12. The Last of England — Ford Madox Brown (1852–55)

An English couple on the deck of an emigrant ship, wrapped in a shared cloak against the grey sea. Brown used his own face and his wife Emma's. The circular format frames them like a locket portrait — a private grief made monumental. Behind them, on the rail, a baby hand — belonging to a child barely old enough to understand what is being left behind.

Now at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

9. The Second Wave and the Aesthetic Movement

The Brotherhood effectively dissolved in the mid-1850s. Millais married Effie Gray (Ruskin's former wife) and moved toward a more conventional career. Hunt continued his solitary, deeply religious path. Only Rossetti remained committed to developing what PRB had started.

Around 1857, a second wave crystallised around Rossetti and the young Oxford painters — Burne-Jones and William Morris above all. This phase is less concerned with social commentary or religious painting and more with pure beauty: the aesthetic intensity of colour, form, and female presence. It connects directly to the Aesthetic Movement of the 1870s–80s and the Symbolist painters of France and Belgium.

The Aesthetes took the PRB's cult of beauty and removed its moral scaffolding. Where Hunt had believed that a painting should preach as well as please, the Aesthetes followed Walter Pater's famous formulation: "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music." Art for art's sake. L'art pour l'art.

This second phase also connects, through Morris & Co., to the Arts and Crafts Movement — the transformation of PRB ideals into furniture, textiles, wallpapers, stained glass, and book design that shaped the look of progressive homes across Britain, Europe, and America into the early 20th century.

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10. Pre-Raphaelitism vs. Romanticism: What's the Difference?

This is one of the most common questions — and the most important one to answer clearly.

Romanticism (c. 1790–1850) was the great European cultural movement that privileged emotion over reason, nature over civilisation, the individual over the collective, and the sublime over the beautiful. Its painters — Delacroix, Géricault, Turner, Friedrich — worked with expressive brushwork, turbulent compositions, and atmospheric colour to convey feeling.

Explore our guide to Romantic art and its 15 most iconic paintings

The Pre-Raphaelites came after Romanticism and in many ways reacted against it — particularly against the painterly looseness and theatrical gesture that characterised Romantic painting. Where a Romantic painter might suggest a flower with three brushstrokes, a Pre-Raphaelite would paint every petal separately.

The key distinctions:

The two movements share a rejection of cold academic classicism and a belief in emotional truth over formal convention. But they arrive at different places. If Romanticism says feel this, Pre-Raphaelitism says look at this, really look.

They are better understood as successive waves of the same anti-academic impulse than as opposing movements. Rossetti explicitly admired the Romantic poets — especially Keats — and PRB subject matter frequently overlaps with Romantic themes (the Lady of Shalott, Ophelia, medieval legend). But the style is unmistakably different.

11. The Legacy: From Symbolism to Tolkien to Today

Symbolism

The second-wave Pre-Raphaelites — especially Rossetti and Burne-Jones — had a profound influence on French and Belgian Symbolism. Gustave Moreau, Fernand Khnopff, Franz von Stuck — all drew on the PRB's fascination with the femme fatale, the dream world, and the dense symbolic surface.

Arts and Crafts

William Morris's Arts and Crafts Movement transformed domestic interiors across the English-speaking world and influenced designers in Scandinavia, Germany (the Werkbund), and the United States. The idea that beautiful objects should be available to ordinary people, not just the aristocracy, is a PRB legacy that resonates today.

Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau's sinuous lines, its celebration of natural forms, its emphasis on the total work of art (combining architecture, decoration, and craft) — all have PRB antecedents. Burne-Jones's elongated figures appear in Klimt; Morris's floral patterns appear everywhere in 1900 design.

Tolkien and Fantasy

J.R.R. Tolkien grew up with PRB images on the walls of his Oxford world — Burne-Jones's stained glass was in the churches he attended, Morris's wallpapers were on the walls of progressive households, Rossetti's illustrated books were on shelves everywhere. The PRB medievalism, their invented mythologies, their sense of a richer, more spiritually intense pre-modern world — these flow directly into The Lord of the Rings and the entire fantasy tradition that follows it.

The Pre-Raphaelite Woman Today

The PRB's image of femininity — the heavy-lidded gaze, the copper hair, the elaborate dress, the atmosphere of melancholy or supernatural power — has had a remarkably long afterlife. You can trace it through the Arts and Crafts Movement, through the 1970s fantasy revival, through Kate Bush's aesthetic, through the gothic and pre-Raphaelite-inspired fashion of the 1990s, and into the visual culture of the internet age, where the paintings are everywhere in art print form.

There is something about the combination of precision and mystery, detail and dream, that continues to feel electrifyingly contemporary. These paintings were made to be looked at for a long time. In an age of the three-second image, that still feels like a radical act.

12. FAQ

What does "Pre-Raphaelite" mean? It means the art that came before Raphael — specifically, the Italian and Flemish painters of the 14th and 15th centuries who preceded the High Renaissance. The Brotherhood felt that Raphael and his followers had substituted idealised formula for genuine observation and feeling.

Why did the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood break up? The original seven never really functioned as a group for long. By 1853–54, Millais had been elected to the Royal Academy (the institution they had rebelled against) and was moving toward a conventional career. Woolner had emigrated. Collinson had resigned on religious grounds. Rossetti and Hunt maintained their artistic commitments but in different directions. The group simply dissolved rather than formally ending.

What is the difference between the first and second Pre-Raphaelite movements? The first movement (1848–1856) was concerned with religious subjects, social commentary, truth to nature, and direct observation. The second wave (from c. 1857) centred on Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Morris, and was more focused on aesthetic beauty, literary subject matter, and the decorative arts. The first phase produced Ophelia; the second produced Proserpine.

Who were the main Pre-Raphaelite models? Elizabeth Siddal, Jane Morris, Annie Miller, Fanny Cornforth, and Alexa Wilding — each with a complex personal relationship to the artists who painted them.

Was John William Waterhouse a Pre-Raphaelite? Not officially. But his subject matter and style are so close to the second-wave PRB that he is almost universally grouped with the movement.

Why are Pre-Raphaelite paintings so luminous? Because of the white ground technique: colours were applied over a wet white base, allowing light to reflect through the paint layer.

What is the connection between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts Movement? William Morris translated PRB aesthetic values into decorative arts through Morris & Co., helping to found the Arts and Crafts Movement.

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13. Bring Pre-Raphaelite Art Into Your Home

At Wallango, we offer a curated selection of premium-quality Pre-Raphaelite prints — museum-grade reproductions of the paintings discussed in this guide.

→ Browse the full Pre-Raphaelite collection

→ John William Waterhouse prints

→ Romantic art prints