The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhoood, Founded
Sep 1848
The Pre-Raphaelite movement, known more commonly as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a nineteen-century group of new wave artists (poets, painters, and critics). The goal of the Pre-Raphaelite movement was to go against traditional art and create something for the ‘modern age’. They moved away from using shades of brown to create emphasized shadows, instead leaned towards replicating the use of sharp and vibrant colours found in fifteenth-century art. The movement was founded in approximately September of 1848 by William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Everett Millais and many other budding and innovative artists. The movement was inspired and associated with John Ruskin, an art critic who was influential to the world of art in America, England, and Britain as a whole. He is well known for influencing the Gothic Revival in the nineteenth century and the twentieth-century functionalist reaction against all such revivalist styles in architecture and design. Christina Rossetti, sister to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was a well-renowned poet in her own right, was not an official member but she was an important member of the inner circle. Later on, her infamous poem, ‘Goblin Market’, would later be illustrated by her brother and William Holman Hunt in the Pre-Raphaelite art style. The second wave of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, founded by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism which focused on medieval eroticism and a particular art technique that created moody or dark atmospheres. This second wave is mostly associated with poetry and sometimes literature.
Sources:
Pre-Raphaelites: An Introduction