The
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English artists which formed an association in 1848
to recapture the beauty and simplicity of the medieval world. Much of their subject matter was taken
from mythological and medieval tales. The founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were the painters
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), John Everett Millais (1829-1896),
James Collinson (1825-1881), Frederic George Stephens (1828-1907), sculptor
Thomas Woolner (1825-1892), and writer William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919).
They identified Raphael (Italian, 1483-1520) with the scientific interestsof Renaissance art.
They aimed to study nature, to sympathize with what is direct, serious and heartfelt
in earlier art, and to infuse their works with literary symbolism, bright colors, and attention to detail.
By 1854 the Brotherhood had ended. Apart from it came a second wave of Pre-Raphaelite art in
the Victorians , chiefly characterized by medieval subjects and ethereal female beauties painted by
Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John William Waterhouse (1849-1917),
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912), and John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937)
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