View source for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Group of artists. Founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was awakened by a youthful rebellious spirit against the strict academic tyranny of the time. Its effort was to breathe new life into art, by refusing obedience to certain conventions and established aesthetics of the Royal Academy. The late 1830s and the 1840s were years of instability and depression and at a turbulent time when revolutions raged in Europe, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood started a change in British culture. 

Allegiance to nature was one of the main doctrines, thus Pre-Raphaelites attempted to depict the characteristic difference of their subject instead of "ideal beauty". Their techniques were also bound with socio-political concerns. The Pre-Raphaelite revolution involved not only a resistance to established aesthetic concepts but also the disapproval of social and gender hierarchies as well. 

Three decades after the Pre-Rapaelite Brotherhood caused an uproar in Victorian Society, Oscar Wilde described its importance in British culture: "The Pre-Raphaelites were a number of young poets and painters who banded together in London... to revolutionize English Poetry and painting. They had three things which the English public never forgive - youth, power and enthusiasm... Their detractors blinded the public, but simply confirmed the artists in their convictions. To disagree with three-fourths of all England on all points is one of the first elements of sanity... This Pre-Raphaelite revolution was not only of ideas, but of creations." [source??]   

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had a brief life: by the beginning of 1853 it stopped to exist. Its literary organ ''The Germ'' was still more short-lived: January 1st to the close of April 1850.



'''== References =='''


Andres, Sophia: ''The Pre-Raphaelites Art of Victorian Novel - Narrative Challenges to Visual Gendered Boundaries''. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005.

Angeli, Helen Rossetti: ''Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Friends and Enemies''. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977.