Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a secret society of seven young English artists and writers, founded in London in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, who rejected the mechanical, formulaic academic style descended from Raphael and the High Renaissance in favor of the intense detail, vivid color and sincerity they found in Italian and Flemish art before Raphael. Their paintings, including Millais's Ophelia and Hunt's The Awakening Conscience, combined meticulous naturalistic observation, often painted directly from nature and models, with subjects drawn from literature, medieval legend and moralizing contemporary scenes. Initially condemned by critics, the group won influential defense from John Ruskin, and though the Brotherhood itself dissolved by the mid-1850s, its aesthetic shaped later English art through Rossetti's own later work and the Arts and Crafts Movement associated with his circle.