(by Sarah Mills – 3 June 2024 – DailyArt Magazine)
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was conceived in c.1848 by artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais. The group, heavily influenced by Romanticism, was known for its interest in revived medievalism, clearly expressed especially in the later paintings of Rossetti. Their use of line, a bright color palette, and attention to detail harked back to fifteenth-century Italian and Flemish art, perhaps also mimicking the illuminated manuscripts of the Medieval period. The group grew and became highly influential, however, it is Rossetti who is perhaps its most well-known member. After 1856 it was he who continued the more medieval aspects of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic.
In October 1857 Rossetti met Jane Burden, later to become Jane Morris. He asked her to model for the group, who were at the time engaged in the production of murals depicting Arthurian legend. By 1859 Jane had married William Morris, a textile designer and poet, but her relationship with Rossetti as his model and muse continued until Rossetti’s death in 1882.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood helped to usher in the new Aesthetic movement in the later Victorian era, with which the phrase ‘art for art’s sake’ is associated. They believed that the appreciation of beauty could be an end in itself, thus they rejected utilitarianism which claimed that all art should have a moral point. Another major exponent of this movement was the writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), who believed in the idea that art should be beautiful before it is anything else, and should not be fashioned around social or moral influences. He believed in the autonomy of art and its freedom from the constraints of proselytizing.
As an additional, quirky bit of information, Lewis Carroll and Rossetti knew each other. Carroll even photographed Rossetti and his family in the garden at their house in Cheyne Walk, 1863!
[ John Everett Millais – Mariana, 1851 ]
