What is the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a secret society of seven young English artists and writers, founded in London in 1848, who rejected the academic tradition descended from Raphael in favour of the sharper observation and brighter colour of Italian painting before 1500. The three founding painters were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, each aged twenty or twenty-one at the time.

When did Pre-Raphaelitism start?

The Brotherhood was formed in September 1848 at Millais's family home in Gower Street, London. Members began signing their paintings 'PRB' from 1849. The secret was revealed by the art critic Angus Reach in 1850, provoking a critical backlash so severe that Charles Dickens attacked Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (1849 to 1850) in Household Words. John Ruskin's 1851 defence rescued the movement's public reputation.

Who are the most famous Pre-Raphaelite artists?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt were the founding trio. Later associates included Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, Ford Madox Brown (a precursor who never formally joined) and, among women painters, Elizabeth Siddal, who was also Rossetti's model and wife. John William Waterhouse worked in a Pre-Raphaelite mode well into the twentieth century, long after the original Brotherhood had dispersed.

What defines Pre-Raphaelite painting?

Pre-Raphaelite canvases feature sharp, near-photographic detail across the entire picture surface, saturated jewel-tone colour laid over a white ground, carefully chosen literary or biblical subjects, and moral or symbolic seriousness. Plants, fabrics and faces are rendered with equal attention. Millais's Ophelia (1851 to 1852), painted partly outdoors over five months at a riverbank in Surrey, exemplifies the method.

What is the difference between Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist painting?

The Pre-Raphaelites (1848 to late 1850s) worked within a Victorian moral and literary tradition, treating religious, Arthurian and Shakespearean subjects with detailed realism and bright colour. Symbolism (c. 1880 to 1910) moved the same interest in myth and literature into dreamier, more ambiguous territory, loosening the realism and darkening the palette. Burne-Jones and the late Rossetti connect the two movements directly.

Why was Pre-Raphaelitism important?

The Brotherhood was the first organised avant-garde in English painting, and its insistence on direct observation over academic convention anticipated Realism and Impressionism in France. William Morris translated Pre-Raphaelite principles into the Arts and Crafts movement, reshaping English design for fifty years. The style remains one of the most popular in British museums and has deeply shaped fantasy illustration ever since.

Where can I see the best Pre-Raphaelite paintings?

Tate Britain in London holds the canonical collection, including Millais's Ophelia, Hunt's The Awakening Conscience and a substantial Rossetti and Burne-Jones holding. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery houses the largest Pre-Raphaelite collection outside London, including Burne-Jones's sketchbooks. Manchester Art Gallery owns Hunt's The Hireling Shepherd. The Delaware Art Museum has the strongest American Pre-Raphaelite collection.

Pre-Raphaelite

7 artists · 1848–1900

The Pre-Raphaelite^[4] Brotherhood formed in London in 1848, when seven young artists and writers declared war on what they saw as the stale conventions of British academic painting. They took their name from a rejection of the artistic tradition that followed Raphael, looking instead to the direct observation and luminous colour of early Italian and Flemish painting. Dante Gabriel Rossetti [8], the group's charismatic centre, combined poetry and painting in works that drew on medieval legend and Arthurian romance. Edward Burne-Jones, who joined the circle in the late 1850s, developed a distinctive style of elongated, dreamlike figures influenced by Botticelli. Ford Madox Brown, though never formally a member, shared the Brotherhood's commitment to painting from nature and addressing modern social subjects. William De Morgan extended Pre-Raphaelite ideals into ceramic design, while Simeon Solomon explored classical and biblical themes with an intensity that set him apart from his contemporaries. The movement's influence reached far beyond painting, shaping the Arts and Crafts movement, book illustration, stained glass, and textile design.

Key Ideas

Truth to Nature

The Brotherhood's founding principle was fidelity to the natural world. They painted outdoors, studied botanical specimens, and insisted on exact observation of light, colour, and texture. John Ruskin, the critic who became their most powerful advocate, praised this commitment in his defence of the group in The Times. Pre-Raphaelite canvases are dense with observed detail: every leaf, every thread of fabric, every ripple of water is recorded with equal care. This democratic attention to all parts of the picture surface was a deliberate rejection of the Royal Academy's emphasis on generalised, idealised form.
Medieval Revival

Rossetti and Burne-Jones turned repeatedly to medieval sources: Dante's Vita Nuova, Malory's Morte d'Arthur, and Arthurian legend. Their medievalism was not antiquarian. It was a way of imagining a world before industrial capitalism, where art, craft, and daily life were unified. William Morris, who became Rossetti's collaborator in the late 1850s, translated this vision into practical design through Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., producing wallpapers, textiles, and furniture that carried Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics into the domestic interior.
The Decorative Arts and Beyond

William De Morgan's ceramic tiles, produced from the 1870s onward, applied Pre-Raphaelite principles of colour and natural form to functional objects. His lustred surfaces and Persian-inspired patterns bridged fine art and craft. Burne-Jones's stained glass designs for Morris & Co. brought the movement's imagery into churches across Britain. Simeon Solomon's drawings and paintings explored themes of desire and spirituality with an emotional directness that anticipated Symbolism. The Pre-Raphaelite impulse proved adaptable to every medium it touched.

Key Artists

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

1828–1882 · British

Edward Burne-Jones

1833–1898 · British

Ford Madox Brown

1821–1893 · British

Progression of Art

Landmark works that shaped the movement.

The Girlhood of Mary Virgin

Dante Gabriel Rossetti · 1849 · Oil on canvas

This was the first painting to carry the initials 'PRB', signed discreetly on the canvas before the Brotherhood's existence was publicly known. Rossetti depicts the young Mary at an embroidery frame, supervised by her mother, St Anne. An angel holds a lily in the foreground. Every surface is painted with the meticulous detail the Brotherhood demanded: the grain of the wooden frame, the texture of the cloth, the veining of the lily petals. The colours are clear and bright, applied over a wet white ground that gives them a luminous, almost stained-glass quality. Rossetti's mother and sister Christina modelled for the figures, grounding the sacred subject in observed domestic reality.

Work

Ford Madox Brown · 1865 · Oil on canvas

Brown spent thirteen years on this painting, which depicts navvies digging up a street in Hampstead alongside a cast of social types: idle gentlemen, a flower seller, a barefoot child, and the intellectuals Thomas Carlyle and F. D. Maurice observing from the right. It is the most ambitious attempt by a painter associated with the Brotherhood to address contemporary social conditions directly. The composition is packed with observed detail, every tool, every brick, every face individualised. Brown inscribed a lengthy explanatory text on the frame, treating the painting as a visual essay on the nature and dignity of labour. The directness of observation and the refusal to idealise working bodies align it with the Brotherhood's founding principles.

Proserpine

Dante Gabriel Rossetti · 1874 · Oil on canvas

Rossetti painted at least eight versions of this subject, each using Jane Morris as his model. Proserpine holds a bitten pomegranate, the fruit that bound her to the underworld. The background is a narrow corridor of dark green, pressing the figure forward toward the viewer. Rossetti's late style is looser and more atmospheric than his early Brotherhood work, trading precise botanical detail for sensuous colour and psychological intensity. The painting conflates myth with personal biography: Rossetti's obsessive attachment to Jane Morris, the wife of his collaborator William Morris, shadows every version. The image became one of the most reproduced Pre-Raphaelite paintings, its combination of beauty and melancholy defining the movement's popular reputation.

The Beguiling of Merlin

Edward Burne-Jones · 1874 · Oil on canvas

Burne-Jones depicts the enchantress Nimue casting a spell over the sleeping Merlin in a hawthorn thicket. The figures are elongated and sinuous, influenced by Botticelli's line and by the decorative flatness of Italian Quattrocento painting. The hawthorn blossoms fill the canvas with a tapestry-like density that blurs the boundary between painting and textile design. Burne-Jones was already designing stained glass and tapestry cartoons for Morris & Co. by this date, and the painting's ornamental quality reflects that dual practice. Nimue's expression is ambiguous, her gaze might be triumphant or sorrowful, lending the scene a psychological complexity that lifts it above simple illustration.

Bacchus (painting)

Simeon Solomon · 1867 · Oil on canvas

Solomon's Bacchus gazes directly at the viewer with heavy-lidded eyes, crowned with vine leaves. The painting combines Pre-Raphaelite colour and detail with a sensuality that disturbed Victorian audiences. Solomon's treatment of classical mythology was more openly erotic and more psychologically ambiguous than that of his Pre-Raphaelite contemporaries. His career was destroyed by a morality conviction in 1873, and his later work, produced in poverty, took on a spiritual intensity that anticipated Symbolism. Bacchus represents the moment before that fall: accomplished, confident, and unapologetically sensual.

Peacock tile panel

William De Morgan · c.1885 · Glazed ceramic tiles

De Morgan's tile panels translated Pre-Raphaelite principles of natural observation and jewel-like colour into ceramic form. His peacock designs, with their iridescent lustre glazes and stylised feather patterns, drew on Persian, Iznik, and medieval English sources. The tiles were produced at De Morgan's Merton Abbey workshop, adjacent to Morris & Co.'s own works. Each tile was hand-painted, maintaining the craft ethic central to the Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts movements. De Morgan's contribution demonstrates that the Brotherhood's influence extended well beyond easel painting into the material culture of everyday life.

Origins

The Brotherhood Forms

In September 1848, seven young men gathered at John Everett Millais's family home in Gower Street, London, and formed a secret society. The founding members were Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, Rossetti's brother William Michael, the sculptor Thomas Woolner, the painter James Collinson, and the critic Frederic George Stephens. They were students or recent graduates of the Royal Academy Schools, frustrated by what they considered the dull, formulaic painting promoted by the institution. Their manifesto was simple: reject the conventions established after Raphael and return to the sincerity and detail of earlier art. They signed their first exhibited paintings with the cryptic initials 'PRB'.

Public Outcry and Ruskin's Defence

When the meaning of 'PRB' became public in 1850, the critical reaction was hostile. Charles Dickens attacked Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents as ugly, vulgar, and blasphemous. The Athenaeum called the Brotherhood's work amateurish and wilfully perverse. The painters might have been crushed, but John Ruskin, already Britain's most influential art critic, wrote two letters to The Times in May 1851 defending their commitment to observed truth and sincerity of feeling. Ruskin's intervention gave the Brotherhood critical legitimacy and attracted younger followers, including Burne-Jones and Morris, who encountered the movement through Ruskin's writing.

Oxford and the Second Wave

By 1853 the original Brotherhood had effectively dissolved. Millais was elected to the Royal Academy, Collinson resigned, and Rossetti rarely exhibited publicly. But in 1857 Rossetti recruited a group of younger artists, including Burne-Jones, Morris, and Arthur Hughes, to paint murals in the Oxford Union debating hall. The murals depicted scenes from Arthurian legend and were painted directly onto the walls with inadequate preparation, so they began to fade almost immediately. Yet the Oxford project marked the beginning of a second Pre-Raphaelite generation that would prove more influential than the first, channelling the movement's ideals into stained glass, wallpaper, book design, and the founding of the Arts and Crafts movement.

In Their Words

“The mind of the artist, as one with his hand, carries out his idea immediately, as if by a divine power.”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Letter to Ford Madox Brown, 1848

“I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any light that ever shone.”

Edward Burne-Jones, Quoted in Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 1904

All Pre-Raphaelite Artists

6 artists.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?
The Pre-Raphaelite^[4] Brotherhood was a secret society of seven young English artists and writers, founded in London in 1848, who rejected the academic tradition descended from Raphael in favour of the sharper observation and brighter colour of Italian painting before 1500. The three founding painters were Dante Gabriel Rossetti^[8], John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, each aged twenty or twenty-one at the time.
When did Pre-Raphaelitism start?
The Brotherhood was formed in September 1848 at Millais's family home in Gower Street, London. Members began signing their paintings 'PRB' from 1849. The secret was revealed by the art critic Angus Reach in 1850, provoking a critical backlash so severe that Charles Dickens attacked Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents (1849 to 1850) in Household Words. John Ruskin's 1851 defence rescued the movement's public reputation.
Who are the most famous Pre-Raphaelite artists?
Dante Gabriel Rossetti^[8], John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt were the founding trio. Later associates included Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, Ford Madox Brown (a precursor who never formally joined) and, among women painters, Elizabeth Siddal, who was also Rossetti's model and wife. John William Waterhouse worked in a Pre-Raphaelite^[4] mode well into the twentieth century, long after the original Brotherhood had dispersed.
What defines Pre-Raphaelite painting?
Pre-Raphaelite^[4] canvases feature sharp, near-photographic detail across the entire picture surface, saturated jewel-tone colour laid over a white ground, carefully chosen literary or biblical subjects, and moral or symbolic seriousness. Plants, fabrics and faces are rendered with equal attention. Millais's Ophelia (1851 to 1852), painted partly outdoors over five months at a riverbank in Surrey, exemplifies the method.
What is the difference between Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist painting?
The Pre-Raphaelites (1848 to late 1850s) worked within a Victorian moral and literary tradition, treating religious, Arthurian and Shakespearean subjects with detailed realism and bright colour. Symbolism (c. 1880 to 1910) moved the same interest in myth and literature into dreamier, more ambiguous territory, loosening the realism and darkening the palette. Burne-Jones and the late Rossetti connect the two movements directly.
Why was Pre-Raphaelitism important?
The Brotherhood was the first organised avant-garde in English painting, and its insistence on direct observation over academic convention anticipated Realism and Impressionism in France. William Morris translated Pre-Raphaelite^[4] principles into the Arts and Crafts movement, reshaping English design for fifty years. The style remains one of the most popular in British museums and has deeply shaped fantasy illustration ever since.
Where can I see the best Pre-Raphaelite paintings?
Tate Britain in London holds the canonical collection, including Millais's Ophelia, Hunt's The Awakening Conscience and a substantial Rossetti and Burne-Jones holding. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery houses the largest Pre-Raphaelite^[4] collection outside London, including Burne-Jones's sketchbooks. Manchester Art Gallery owns Hunt's The Hireling Shepherd. The Delaware Art Museum has the strongest American Pre-Raphaelite collection.

Sources

Pre-Raphaelite editorial draws on the following published scholarship.

[1] book Tim Barringer, The Pre-Raphaelites, 2012 Used for: biography, exhibition history, influences, stylistic analysis.
[2] book Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld, and Alison Smith, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 2012 Used for: exhibition history, stylistic analysis.
[3] book Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 1904 Used for: biography, political views, stylistic analysis, technique.
[4] wikipedia Wikipedia: Pre-Raphaelite Used for: biography.
[5] book Robert de la Sizeranne, The Pre-Raphaelites Used for: biography.
[6] book Charlene Spretnak (auth.), The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art _ Art History Reconsidered, 1800 to the Present Used for: biography.
[7] book Beckett, Wendy, The story of painting Used for: biography.
[8] wikipedia Wikipedia: Dante Gabriel Rossetti Used for: biography.

Editorial overseen by Solis Prints. Sources verified 2026-06-30. Click a source for details, or hover over [N] in the page above to preview.

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Key Ideas

Truth to Nature

Medieval Revival

The Decorative Arts and Beyond