After The Pre Raphaelites

What happened in Victorian painting and sculpture after the pre-Raphaelites? Aestheticism has been called the next avant-garde movement but attention has centred on literary figures such as Algernon Charles Swinburn, Walter Peter and Oscar Wilde. This volume overviews parallel trends in the visual arts, including the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeil Whistler, Edward Burne-Jones, Simeon Solomon and Albert Moore among others.

This illustrated book focuses on the Pre-Raphaelite artists and their radical departure from artistic conventions. Barringer explores the meanings encoded in Pre-Raphaelite paintings and analyses key pictures and their significance within the complex social and cultural matrix of 19th century Britain.

When the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood met in 1848, they were to produce a statement of ideas that would revolutionize artistic practice in pre-Victorian England. This book examines why these ideas still retain the power to fascinate and shock 150 years later.

In Victorian England, with the country swept up in the Industrial Revolution, the Pre-Raphaelites, close to William Morris’ Arts and Crafts movement, yearned for a return to bygone values. Wishing to revive the pure and noble forms of the Italian Renaissance, the major painters of the circle (such as John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt) favoured realism and biblical themes over the academicism of the time. This work, with its captivating text and rich illustrations, describes with enthusiasm this singular movement which notably inspired Art Nouveau and Symbolism.

A magnificent new book on the Pre-Raphaelites—oversized, gorgeously illustrated, and packed with insight Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. These were among the young British artists who, in the revolutionary year of 1848, set out to return a lost vibrancy to European art. Calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, they and their later followers—including Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris—mounted an artistic front against what they saw as the confining standards of the Victorian art world, and the dehumanizing aspects of the industrial age. Their works drew on Shakespeare, Keats, Tennyson, and medieval lore. They also treated religious and contemporary themes with striking realism, bringing viewers into intimate contact with the subject and causing scandal in their time. In this authoritative yet highly readable volume, art historian Aurélie Petiot traces Pre-Raphaelitism from its beginnings as a secret brotherhood to its dissemination in multiple strands of British art and beyond. Petiot offers keen analyses of Pre-Raphaelite painting, drawing, and decorative art alike. She gives particular attention to the role of women in the movement, not only as models and muses, but as pioneering artists in their own right, whose work has only begun to receive its proper recognition. Uniquely, the last chapters of the book are devoted to the enduring (yet often underestimated) Pre-Raphaelite influence on the later course of modern art and on our contemporary culture. More than 300 full-color illustrations reproduce all the great Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces, as well as many fascinating lesser-known works, with all the luminous brilliance and detail for which the Pre-Raphaelites are renowned. This splendid volume is a must-have for any art history lover.

Drawn from Birmingham Museums Trust's incomparable collection of Victorian art and design, this exhibition will explore how three generations of young, rebellious artists and designers, such as Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, revolutionized the visual arts in Britain, engaging with and challenging the new industrial world around them.

This vibrant collection of essays claims that a complex network of texts by critics, biographers and diarists established the credibility and influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Throughout the twentieth century, Modernist taste failed to acknowledge the achievement of oppositional groupings such as the Pre-Raphaelites. The essays collected here, however, reveal that the British group anticipated later avant-gardes by using the written word to configure for itself a radical artistic identity. Public and critics alike were scandalized by the radicalism of Pre-Raphaelite painting, its unflinching portrayal of historical figures and of contemporary life, and its irreverent attitude to artistic convention. Pre-Raphaelitism's innovations were not confined to style: new forms of artistic identity and behaviour were explored. As the contributors interrogate the texts through which Pre-Raphaelitism was constructed, they demonstrate that the movement's wide influence as a cultural phenomenon derived from the interplay between exhibited works and critical discourse. Applying a range of sophisticated methodologies from the fields of literary studies, art history, and cultural studies, these interdisciplinary essays uncover the neglected role of texts in the success of the Pre-Raphaelite rebellion and argue in favor of a new centrality for this movement in the history of nineteenth-century European culture.