ArtToday: Pre-Raphaelites in Birmingham, UK

History of Art

Pre-Raphaelites

in Birmingham, UK

You will probably hear something from the Pre-Raphaelites lots and lots of time on this page.

But let me talk more about them.

In 1848, a group of young artists banded together to form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

They shared a dissatisfaction with the standards of painting and teaching at the Royal Academy, and decided to instigate a revolt.

Taking as their guiding principle the idea of depicting a subject as truthfully as possible - whether a landscape or a scene from history or literature - they looked back to early Italian painting (Pre-Raphael) for inspiration.

The idea of brotherhood, or secret society, reflected both a spirit of adolescent comradeship and an intense seriousness of purpose.

Almost Leonardo di Caprio...but it's William Holman Hunt

The leading members were John Everett Millais, only nineteen but already an accomplished painter by 1848; William Holman Hunt, a fellow pupil who found academic methods increasingly uncongenial; and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, struggling to master basic techniques and torn between poetry and painting. Along with Rossetti's brother William Michael, a budding critic who was to become secretary to the group, three others were recruited: James Collinson, a shy and deeply religious friend of Rossetti; Thomas Woolnet , a sculptor and poet; and Frederic George Stephens, who was soon to give up to painting to become a writer on art.

The Brotherhood's aim were summarised by William Michael Rossetti:

To have genuine ideas to express;
to study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;
to sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-paradigm and learned by rote;
and most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statuses.

The "Pre-Raphaelites" wanted to give away from the pompous history paintings and sentimental genre scenes that seemed to them to fill the Academy's walls each year.

The "genuine ideas" were to include subjects to drawn from modern life, but even in the treatment of familiar stories from Shakespeare and the Bible, their determination "to study Nature" would produce a wholly fresh kind of art.

The paintings below are exposed in the

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (UK)