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In the autumn of 1848, seven young artists and writers agreed to sign their work with three initials, PRB. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood began as a private rebellion against the Royal Academy and grew into one of the most influential movements in British art. Their pictures, jewel-coloured, minutely observed and rich in symbolism, still command devotion from collectors and institutions more than a century and a half later.
The founders believed British painting had grown stale, trapped in the brown varnish and stock poses taught by the academies. Their name announced the cure: a return to the sincerity they saw in Italian art before Raphael. In practice this meant painting directly from nature with almost scientific fidelity, brilliant colour laid on a wet white ground, and serious subjects drawn from scripture, poetry and medieval legend. The critics were merciless at first, but John Ruskin's public defence of the group in 1851 turned the tide, and within a decade their influence ran through British art, design and literature.
Poet as much as painter, Rossetti was the movement's magnetic centre. His early watercolours of Dantean and Arthurian subjects gave way to the sensuous half-length portraits of women, Elizabeth Siddal and later Jane Morris above all, that defined his mature work and steered Pre-Raphaelitism towards the Aesthetic movement.
A prodigy admitted to the Royal Academy Schools at eleven, Millais possessed the most complete technique of the group. Ophelia, painted over months beside a Surrey river, remains the movement's best loved image. He later made peace with the establishment and died as President of the Royal Academy he had once defied.
Holman Hunt held to the Brotherhood's founding principles longer than anyone. His pursuit of truth to nature took him repeatedly to the Holy Land to paint biblical subjects on the spot, and works such as The Light of the World became some of the most widely reproduced images of the Victorian age.
Leader of the second Pre-Raphaelite generation, Burne-Jones brought a dreamlike medievalism to painting and, through his lifelong partnership with William Morris, to stained glass, tapestry and book design. His work carried the movement's ideals to the end of the century and directly influenced European Symbolism.
The Brotherhood formally dissolved within a few years, but its consequences ran on for half a century. Its insistence on craftsmanship and honest materials fed directly into the Arts and Crafts Movement, its later decorative phase shaped Aestheticism, and its literary, dreamlike imagery echoes through Symbolism and beyond. Few British movements have left so long a shadow.
Major Pre-Raphaelite oils rarely leave museum walls, so when significant works do appear at auction they make headlines and seven-figure sums. For collectors, the accessible territory is drawings, watercolours, prints and works by the wider circle of followers and studio associates, where fine things can still be found at gentler levels. Attribution is everything in this field, the difference between a follower and an autograph study is measured in multiples, which is why a specialist eye matters before anything is sold. Our British and European art department offers a free valuation of Victorian pictures, drawings and prints, whether a single work or a collection formed over a lifetime.
