The Pre-Raphaelites - the history of the art movement, Rossetti, Millais, and British dream art

The Pre-Raphaelites are one of the nineteenth century's most fascinating art movements - a group of young British painters who in 1848 rebelled against the academic conventions of their time and created art filled with vivid color, botanical precision, and literary drama. Their paintings are now among the most reproduced in the world: Ophelia drowning among the reeds, the red-haired woman in a white dress in a boat, tales of knights, and medieval dreams rendered with a level of detail few movements before or since have matched.

The name literally means "before Raphael." The seven founders turned their backs on the polished, formulaic art championed by the Royal Academy and looked back to Italian art before the High Renaissance - to the sincere naturalism and clear colors of the fifteenth century. The result was one of the most distinctive visual worlds in European art history, and a movement whose influence extends from William Morris's textiles to today's fantasy illustration. This page covers the history of the Pre-Raphaelites, their most important works, the techniques behind the images, the women who both painted and modeled, and how Pre-Raphaelite art can be used in the Swedish home.

Contents
↓ What are the Pre-Raphaelites?
↓ The history behind the Brotherhood
↓ The most important works
↓ Technique and artistic signature
↓ Women, models, and artists
↓ The second generation and its legacy
↓ The Pre-Raphaelites in Sweden and the Nordic countries
↓ Pre-Raphaelite art in the home
↓ Timeline
↓ Related art movements
↓ Frequently asked questions

What are the Pre-Raphaelites?

The Pre-Raphaelites, or the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (abbreviated PRB), were an association of seven British artists and writers formed in London in 1848. At its core were three painting students from the Royal Academy: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. They were joined by William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens, and the sculptor Thomas Woolner. The Brotherhood was formally founded at Millais's parents' home at 83 Gower Street in London.

What united them was dissatisfaction with academic art. The Royal Academy favored an idealized, darkly varnished painting style that looked back to Raphael and the Italian High Renaissance. The Pre-Raphaelites instead wanted to return to the freshness and sincerity they saw in art before Raphael - among the Italian masters of the fifteenth century and in the late medieval pictorial tradition. Their program had three aims: to breathe new life into British art, to make it as powerful as the works of the early Renaissance, and to depict both nature and genuine emotions without academic idealization.

Quick facts: Founded in London in 1848. Seven members in the Brotherhood. Founders: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (20 years old), John Everett Millais (19 years old), and William Holman Hunt (21 years old). Signed their first works with the initials "PRB" at the 1849 exhibition. Drew inspiration from Italian art before Raphael (the 1400s). The critic John Ruskin became the movement's foremost defender. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford owns one of the world's finest collections of Pre-Raphaelite art.

The history behind the Brotherhood

The founders were strikingly young when they formed their alliance in the autumn of 1848. Millais was only 19, Rossetti 20, and Holman Hunt 21 - a group of talented students who, with the confidence of youth, decided to reform all of British art. The following year, 1849, the three leading members exhibited their first important works, all bearing the enigmatic letters PRB after the signature. At first, no outsider knew what the initials meant, and when the secret was revealed, it was interpreted as an insult to 350 years of painting tradition.

The reception was icy. Critics called the style crude, clumsy, and deliberately ugly, while the author Charles Dickens condemned Millais's biblical scene of the young Jesus in a carpenter's workshop as repulsive. The turning point came when the influential art critic John Ruskin came to the movement's defense in letters to The Times newspaper in 1851. Ruskin's authority saved the Brotherhood from being stifled at birth and gave the young painters the breathing room they needed. The Brotherhood itself, however, did not remain united for long in its original form - by the mid-1850s, its members had gone their separate ways. Millais was eventually elected to the academy he had once rebelled against and became its president, while Rossetti withdrew into a more dreamlike, medieval-inspired direction that would give rise to the movement's second generation.

The rebellion was also rooted in the spirit of the age. During the 1840s, Britain underwent rapid industrialization, and to the young artists, the modern world's dirty factories and mass-produced goods appeared to represent a loss of authenticity and beauty. By looking back to the ideals of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, they expressed a longing for a simpler, more soulful existence. The Brotherhood even published its own journal, The Germ, which in 1850 spread their ideas about art, poetry, and nature to a small but devoted readership. Although the journal ran for only four issues, it shows how deliberately the young artists worked to formulate an entire artistic program, not merely a new painting style.

The most important works

The Pre-Raphaelites' visual world is immediately recognizable: saturated colors, meticulously rendered nature, and subjects drawn from the Bible, Shakespeare, medieval legends, and contemporary poetry. Some works became so beloved that they now hang as reproductions in homes around the world.

Ophelia by John Everett Millais

Millais's Ophelia (1851–1852) is perhaps the movement's most famous work and an icon of British art. The subject is drawn from Shakespeare's Hamlet: the mad Ophelia floats singing toward her death in the water, surrounded by flowers with carefully chosen symbolic significance. Millais painted the lush vegetation on location by the River Hogsmill in Surrey with almost botanical exactness. Today the painting hangs at Tate Britain in London, where it was donated as part of Sir Henry Tate's gift to the nation. The work is a perfect summation of everything the Pre-Raphaelites sought: fidelity to nature, literary drama, and a luminous clarity of color.

The Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse

Although John William Waterhouse painted decades after the brotherhood had dissolved, his The Lady of Shalott (1888) is considered one of the highlights of the Pre-Raphaelite visual world. The subject is based on Alfred Tennyson's 1832 poem and shows the cursed lady drifting toward Camelot and her death in a boat. Waterhouse painted a total of three versions of the figure – in 1888, 1894, and 1915 – and the first was given to the public by Sir Henry Tate in 1894. The red-haired woman in white deliberately echoes Millais's Ophelia and has become one of the most reproduced images in the genre.

The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt

William Holman Hunt's The Light of the World (1853) is one of the most widely circulated religious images of the nineteenth century and shows Christ knocking on an overgrown door without a handle – an emblem of the soul that must open from within. The original hangs in the side chapel at Keble College in Oxford. Hunt later painted a version that is now at Manchester Art Gallery, and a third, roughly fifty years later, which is displayed in St Paul's Cathedral in London. Hunt was the founder who remained most faithful to the brotherhood's original ideals throughout his life.

Rossetti's female portraits

Dante Gabriel Rossetti developed a distinctive, sensual type of image featuring grand female figures drawn from myth and poetry. Proserpine (1871), depicting the captive underworld goddess with a pomegranate in her hand, belongs to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Beata Beatrix (1864–1870), a poignant memorial portrait of his late wife Elizabeth Siddal in the guise of Dante's Beatrice, is held at Tate Britain. Rossetti's work laid the foundation for the movement's second generation and its dream-saturated, decorative aesthetic.

"If they continue in this way, they may lay the foundations in our England for a school of art nobler than anything the world has seen in three hundred years." – John Ruskin, defending the Pre-Raphaelites in The Times, 1851

Technique and artistic signature

What makes a Pre-Raphaelite painting immediately recognizable is the combination of scientific accuracy and emotional intensity. The artists often worked outdoors, directly from nature, and depicted every leaf, flower, and reflection in the water with a fidelity that radically broke with the contemporary habit of painting stylized landscapes in the studio.

Color and Light on a Wet White Ground

To achieve their characteristic luminosity, the Pre-Raphaelites developed a special technique: they painted thin, translucent layers of color on a damp, bright-white ground. The light was then reflected back through the paint, giving the images a jewel-like intensity that distinguished them from the brown, darkened academic art. The result was color that still appears unusually fresh, more than 170 years later.

Faithfulness to Nature in Every Detail

Ruskin's exhortation that artists should go to nature "without rejecting anything and without leaving anything out" became a guiding principle. Millais spent months painting the vegetation in Ophelia, and Hunt traveled all the way to the Dead Sea to depict a landscape with accurate geography. This obsession with reality means that Pre-Raphaelite works can still be studied almost like botanical plates today.

Symbolism and Literary Subjects

Almost every detail in a Pre-Raphaelite painting carries meaning. The flowers around Ophelia are chosen from the Victorian tradition of the language of flowers, in which poppies signify death and violets fidelity. The subjects were drawn from Shakespeare, Dante, Tennyson, Keats, and the Bible, making the paintings a form of visual literature. "Reading" a Pre-Raphaelite painting is therefore as much a narrative experience as a visual one.

The Women, Models, and Artists

No art movement is as closely associated with its female figures as the Pre-Raphaelites. The red-haired, dreamy women in the paintings were real people, and several of them were far more than passive models - they were artists and poets in their own right.

Elizabeth Siddal

Elizabeth Siddal was discovered at age nineteen in a hat shop and became the movement's most famous model. She posed for Millais's Ophelia, lying for hours in a bathtub filled with water meant to represent the river; the heat lamps went out, the water became ice-cold, and she fell seriously ill. But Siddal was also an artist. John Ruskin was so impressed by her drawings that he offered her an annual stipend of £150, and she was the only woman to exhibit at the 1857 Pre-Raphaelite exhibition. In 1860, she married Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Jane Morris and the Later Muses

The movement's second generation revolved around Jane Morris, William Morris's wife and Rossetti's great source of inspiration. With her flowing dark hair and melancholic bearing, she shaped the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of womanhood in countless later works by Rossetti. The women around the Brotherhood - Siddal, Jane Morris, Fanny Cornforth, and others - have in recent years been highlighted as independent figures rather than merely models, changing how the movement is interpreted.

The second generation and its legacy

When the original Brotherhood dissolved in the mid-1850s, a second wave of Pre-Raphaelitism emerged around Dante Gabriel Rossetti and two younger admirers: Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. This generation shifted the focus from photographic naturalism to a more decorative, dreamlike, and medievalist aesthetic that would have enormous significance for European design as a whole.

Morris & Co and Arts and Crafts

In 1861, William Morris founded the firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co with Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and several others; in 1875 it was reorganized as Morris & Company. The workshop produced stained glass, furniture, textiles, and wallpaper with botanical motifs and became the very starting point of the Arts and Crafts movement. By reviving medieval craftsmanship as a counterweight to industrial mass production, the second generation of Pre-Raphaelites transformed a painting style into an entire way of life centered on art, craft, and interior design.

Burne-Jones and Symbolism

Edward Burne-Jones developed a floating, timeless pictorial world populated by knights, goddesses, and mythical figures that built a bridge between Pre-Raphaelitism and European Symbolism at the turn of the century. His large, tapestry-like canvases with pale figures in fairy-tale landscapes influenced artists far beyond Britain and helped ensure that the Pre-Raphaelite dream aesthetic lived on into the 20th century.

The Pre-Raphaelites in Sweden and the Nordic region

For a long time, the Pre-Raphaelites were surprisingly unknown to the wider Swedish public, despite the clear points of contact between their dream-saturated aesthetic and Nordic turn-of-the-century art and Symbolism. That changed in spring 2009, when the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm opened the major exhibition The Pre-Raphaelites on February 26. It was the first time the movement had been given a dedicated exhibition in the Nordic region, and it comprised around 220 works, made possible through generous loans from leading British museums.

Ten years later, in autumn 2019, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde in Stockholm presented an exhibition on Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898) - the first monographic exhibition of a Pre-Raphaelite artist in Scandinavia. That Waldemarsudde, founded by the painter Prince Eugen, took on the subject is fitting, since Nordic National Romanticism and Symbolism share the Pre-Raphaelites' love of fairy tales, nature, and melancholy light. For a Swedish viewer, it is easy to see the kinship between Burne-Jones's world of knights and John Bauer's enchanted fairy-tale forest. Those wishing to explore the Swedish counterpart in greater depth can browse Bozetto's selection of Swedish art.

Pre-Raphaelite art in the home

Few art movements lend themselves as well to reproduction as Pre-Raphaelite painting. The vivid colors, clear motifs and narrative character mean that a poster can be enjoyed for a long time and is ideally hung in a place where the eye can rest. A Pre-Raphaelite picture is particularly well suited to rooms with a sense of calm and time for reflection, such as the bedroom, reading nook or hallway where it greets visitors.

The world of motifs is rich: the botanically precise floral motifs connect with today's interest in flower posters and nature motifs, while the dramatic scenes and portraits of women belong among our most sought-after works by famous artists. A Pre-Raphaelite image with its saturated green and red tones pairs beautifully with natural materials such as oak, linen and brass, and works equally well in a modern or more traditionally furnished home.

Tip: Pre-Raphaelite motifs often feature deep greens and warm red tones. Choose a simple frame in dark wood or matte black to enhance the medieval atmosphere, and let the picture hang alone with plenty of space around it rather than in a tight grouping – these images tell a story and deserve room to breathe. Read more in our guide to framing art.

Timeline

The history of Pre-Raphaelitism stretches from the year of rebellion, 1848, to the second generation's late flowering at the turn of the century. The following chronology highlights the movement's key milestones:

1848 – The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is founded in London by Rossetti, Millais, Hunt and four other members.
1849 – The first works are exhibited under the mysterious initials "PRB".
1850 – Millais's painting of the young Jesus in the carpenter's workshop is harshly condemned by critics, including Charles Dickens.
1851 – John Ruskin defends the movement in The Times and turns public opinion around.
1852 – Millais completes Ophelia with Elizabeth Siddal as the model.
1853 – Hunt paints The Light of the World; the Brotherhood begins to dissolve.
1857 – Siddal becomes the only woman to exhibit at the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition.
1861 – William Morris founds Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, paving the way for the Arts and Crafts movement.
1871 – Rossetti paints Proserpine, one of the second generation's icons.
1888 – Waterhouse paints the first version of The Lady of Shalott.
2009 – The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm presents the movement's first dedicated exhibition in the Nordic region.

Related art movements

Pre-Raphaelitism is closely connected with several other periods and movements. It grew out of and in opposition to Romanticism and shared its love of nature and emotion, while its naturalism has points of contact with Realism. Through the second generation's dreamlike and myth-filled visual world, the movement points toward Symbolism, and through William Morris's furniture and textiles, it is closely connected with William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. A broader overview of how these movements relate to one another can be found in our guide to art history. Explore more artists and periods in our comprehensive Knowledge Base.

Frequently asked questions about the Pre-Raphaelites

Would you like to bring the vivid colors and storytelling delight of the Pre-Raphaelite visual world into your home? Explore our selection of works by renowned artists and our posters with floral motifs, and feel free to read more about how to decorate with posters and create a gallery wall. More on the subject can be found at Swedish Wikipedia, at the Tate, at the Nationalmuseum, and at Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde.