Pre-Raphaelites
I visited National Gallery of Art, Washington DC on Friday, March 29, 2013 to see the exhibition “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848-1900”.
It is the first major survey of the art of the Pre-Raphaelites to be shown in the United States features some 130 paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and decorative art objects. The young members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed in 1848, shook the art world of mid-19th-century Britain by rejecting traditional approaches to painting. Combining scientific precision, an innovative approach to subject matter, and brilliant, clear colors, Pre-Raphaelitism was Britain's first avant-garde art movement.
Queen Victoria had been on the throne for little more than a decade when seven fervent young men formed a secret society in London in 1848 with the aim of rejuvenating the arts in industrial-age Britain. Bonding over their mutual passion for medieval art and disdain for contemporary painting practices, they called their group the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) in acknowledgment of their admiration of art prior to Raphael (1483 – 1520). The three most talented members were John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William
Holman Hunt — ages nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one, respectively. Along with other artists in their circle, most significantly their mentor Ford Madox Brown, they sowed the seeds of a self-consciously avant-garde movement, one whose ideals they published in a short-live journal, The Germ. Pre-Raphaelite paintings often addressed subjects of moral seriousness, whether pertaining to history, literature, religion, or modern society.
1. John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851-1852 oil on canvas
Tate Gallery, London. Presented by Sir Henry Tate 1894
The descent into madness of Shakespeare’s gentle maiden after her beloved Hamlet murdered her father had fascinated British artists since the late eighteenth century.
To capture the