The Pre-Raphaelites - artists gentle in nature

The Pre- Raphaelites, once known as The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, were a group of English artists, poets and art critics. They rejected the Royal Academy's classical view of art such as the promotion of Raphael, and rejected the Renaissance artists' emphasis on classical poses. Instead, they favoured realism and landscape painting.

In 1848, at the house of John Everett Millais' parents on Gower Street, London, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded. The first seven members were William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner. The Brotherhood was only a loose association, and their principles were shared by other artists at the time such as John William Waterhouse and William Morris.

The principles of the Brotherhood were expressed as four declarations and defined by Rossetti:

1. To have genuine ideas to express.

2. To study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them.

3. To sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote.

4. To produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.

The Brotherhood made sure that their principles were non-dogmatic. They believed in the personal responsibility of each artist to determine their own ideas and methods of depiction. In fact, the members saw freedom and responsibility as one entity. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was hugely influenced by nature and used great detail to portray the natural world.

The work of the Pre-Raphaelite artists is also noted for its depiction of women as fragile and often painted in dream-like states as goddesses and muses, pale-faced and clad in flowing gowns. The images of these women came to personify an age that future generations would look upon with scorn.

The Pre-Raphaelites - artists gentle in nature

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